Various people attempted to decipher it, but it seems they were missing one crucial hint. They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked. That’s because they missed one easy clue.

It appears that is not true.

Someone here [1] has found a [German] blog [2] writing about this cipher. There are two comments (Jan and Helmut) from 2014 under the blog post which posit that it's a book cipher.

Here's one of those comments [in German]:

"Die Lösung müsste eigentlich mit Hilfe des Buches zu finden sein (..who worthily will hear or read this book..)"

I find it curious that the article here claims that people have attempted to decipher it and lists a few methods that are quite similar to what’s proposed in the comments under that post, except for those two comments.

[1] https://smackernews.com/item/49689516 HN [2] https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...

But as they do eventually explain, the LLM's task wasn't solely to solve this specific problem, it was to first identify an unsolved problem it could solve. That's potentially more impressive and difficult than solving the unremarkable cipher itself.

Historically, many of these problems were bottlenecked by human attention. Someone had to care enough to spend hours or days reading obscure material, testing unpromising ideas, tracing references, and trying things that might go nowhere

I wonder how many of the recent results are due to the fact that very few looked at the problem to start with. Still great results, but the general impression is that it's more about the so many low-hanging fruits than the actual capability.

In the same way if you tell an LLM to go and find an unsolved cipher it can solve, of course it finds the one it can solve out of the set of all possible ciphers. Of course it finds one that uses a one time pad that is public and referenced nearby in the text.

It's the same trick used by those people who film themselves throwing a basketball backwards into the hoop. You do it enough times and don't show the misses. You pick the best one to show. It makes it look like you're a basketball genius when you aren't.

It is of course, still a cool trick. Those videos are fun to watch, and so is an LLM solving a cipher. It is absolutely incredible to live in the timeline where you can tell a computer in plain language to go and find a puzzle on the internet and solve it, and it does exactly that. It's truly a mind boggling miracle.

The first principle is that we must not fool ourself, and ourselves are the easiest people to fool. (Ht Feynman)

Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]

I had a visceral reaction to these three words.

O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND

That's like working out a cereal box cipher and finding the message is "Do your homework and tidy your room".

The successor to Klaus's blog is Satoshi Tomokiyo's Cryptiana site, so a month ago I asked Opus 5 to scrape it all, rank them and have a go at solving some. It didn't get the ranking right. But I knew the Civil War Stager ciphers were ripe for solving, so I had it do those https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2026/09/route-transposition-c...

The art of solving historical unsolved ciphers is knowing what is on the boundary of solvability. Since this site attracts so many OpenAI and Anthropic employees, I'll mention one that was featured by both Klaus and Satoshi in 2023, presumably Spanish transposition, which should be on that boundary but has resisted all attempts at solution https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-telegram-from-switz...

I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.

Fascinating. I wonder if you could show "fake news" to a weaker model and get it to be more ambitious in its attempted solutions, even if it's not fundamentally any smarter.

The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas.

Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.

The Olympics exist because we want to see human skill, even though jet planes exist.

I guess im just sick of the fact we keep entertaining attention whoring of the most basic variety.

Obviously this is just survivorship bias/p-hacking/insert-other-buzzword but can't help but anthropomorphize it, it is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the same person who cannot produce code without 2 unrelated bugs both not present does this for someone else.

Imagine a math teacher struggling to understand what he is teaching casually solving a millennium problem, then go back to not understanding what he is teaching, doesn't happen in our world.

I am not confused by any of this, I am just trying to communicate an idea.

The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it

This is how I usually characterize AI to friends who have no background in computers: it's an indefatigable (that is, not able to be fatigued) employee who has read nearly everything in the world, who does make mistakes, but who never lacks for motivation.

Most humans would become discouraged after being told 20 times that their work fell short, but AI agents will persevere en masse until the oceans are boiled, for better or for worse.

indeed as the author mentioned, LLMs can greatly help in areas where there is a long tail of not so important, easy to solve problems, that humans just don't have the time or priority to focus on. But combine this long tail of problems that can be solved: accumulated this might still be very beneficial as a sum of things.

This is impressive as it is optimizing the effort on the low, but not too low hanging fruit.

Caveats, stated plainly:

Remember when they said it didn't sound like Claude anymore

Trust me when I say it’s super important to a niche area of physics. People have spent their whole careers trying to solve it.

What people? Well you or I have never met them. I swear I have a girlfriend, she just goes to a different school. But trust me it’s a super important problem.

What will this change about the world? Nothing, but trust me this is a historic event and it means these LLMs are super smart and not just brute forcing machines.

I’m certain there’s a 10% chance that brute forcing old riddles that 4 people know about might kill us. Please regulate me I’m too smart for my own good and out of control.

The ciphertext is not just the end of a particular chapter, it is the epilogue of the entire book/text. So the deduction of it needing to use the 32 listed points (that happen to be on the preceding page [at least in re-prints on archive]) to decode - rather than anything else anywhere in the book - just strikes me as slightly strange? Almost as if maybe something [not in the text] tipped it off to this being the solution?

Is there some sort of enumerated list somewhere that we can run as a test suite and then we can make a bigger deal about the percentage of that list that we're burning down as these models improve?

176k tokens

That's the most impressive part to me! That's barely one low-to-medium intensity session of front-end web-dev!

gave it some encouragement. I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.

This is pretty ridiculous when you think about it.

He wrote the cipher, and then, upon hearing Charles II was Restored to the throne he laughed until he died. The cipher reads, "O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLES THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND" and so he was laughing because he just made an excellent joke that he can't tell anyone about until someone figures it out.

Someone needs to add this to Wikipedia. It will be necessary to first convince an academic to make the claim so there's a reasonable citation.

Oh, and haha. It was a nice one, Thomas.

All of these breakthroughs are in verifiable brute force domains, and some of them are probably wrong because of a typo in a lean specification or just a base level axiom being incomplete.

I think the better the way to think about LLMs is like they are new substances, like when we first discovered clay or bronze, but confined to the digital realm. Previously we were chipping away at stones trying to make to things as close to useful as possible, then we found a step change. LLMs are like clay but they have their limitations. Wake me up when they are proposing new, { conjecture: interesting|useful|new } and not as a side effect of trying to get to a goal.

:)

"LLM can't handle out-of-domain (OOD) queries!" Yeah.

This will happen a lot.

People assume and even predict that some collectors' pieces will be worth tons of money. People did that for centuries.

Now big corps are gonna buy up those undisclosed solutions for top dollar.

gg, well played to the people who didn't and don't need the credit.

bbng to the corps who need that to fake progress in the field and of their models. booooo! booooooo! you should be ashamed of yourselves! booooo!

PS: even nobody needs none of those "I can fuck over idiots plays. Everybody needs proper progress, research, investigations, smarter users. It's 2026. That qualitatively cheap money will only breed more cheap money and more cheap users and suppliers! Who the hell wants their neighborhood or planet to have more of the cheap stuff? What the hell happened to these peoples' brain circuits? Somebody should investigate! (maybe some tech journalists are already on it!? ...)

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This cannot be real. This website is ill.