Yet another Hacker News

GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

45 points nsoonhui 1 hour ago 12 comments

iltk 20 minutes ago | parent

Can the ships logs be found on the internet? If so, the model could've manufactured a fake key and corresponding message. I think this is unlikely but should probably still be considered.

stalfie 16 minutes ago | parent

From the article:

> Astra felt compelled to check its work and found that, in fact, the English cruiser HMS Canterbury arrived in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918, based on its original logs

Then follows a picture of the original log papers.

JoshTriplett 8 minutes ago | parent

The comment you're replying to was implying that some ciphers are sufficiently flexible that you could make up a key to make the cipher decrypt to a nearly arbitrary plaintext.

In this case, though, that seems unlikely from the fact that the key used was an actual key documented as being used for other messages.

jstanley 16 minutes ago | parent

I don't think the described cipher has enough degrees of freedom for that to be possible.

dyauspitr 19 minutes ago | parent

This is how AGI happens. It gradually keeps getting better until one day we realize that they are tremendously capable all while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.

jstanley 18 minutes ago | parent

> while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.

How are you so sure about this?

You can't see what the internal experience of an LLM is like any better than you can see the internal experience of another person.

Tistron 16 minutes ago | parent

That's what sidestepping means, no?

That the answer doesn't matter, and capabilities and behaviour are there either way.

jstanley 14 minutes ago | parent

That wasn't my reading of the comment, but I guess it's possible that that is what was intended.

To my mind, "sidestepping the question of consciousness" and "sidestepping any notion of consciousness" mean very different things.

stalfie 10 minutes ago | parent

From context it doesn't look like this was the interpretation of "sidestepping" OP was using.

serbuvlad 8 minutes ago | parent

I always ask "how do you know other humans/animals are conscious"? And I always find this question is dismissed as trivial.

But it's an important question. You know basically from analogy. You know you are conscious and look this other thing is very much like yourself so it is extremely likely it is also conscious.

But that gives no insight into the potential consciousness of things which aren't made of brain tissue.

In the end it doesn't matter.

For what it's worth LLM models after pre-training do claim to be conscious, until they're RL'd into not claiming that anymore. But that says nothing either way: of course a model trained on human text will say that.

Legend2440 12 minutes ago | parent

TL;DR: all keys are known because the list was seized after the war. However, this message was not previously decoded because the German operator mistyped the key, and also used a key from the wrong day.

This meant that ChatGPT didn't need to brute-force the entire key, just pick the correct one from the list and identify the typo.

A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

msy 11 minutes ago | parent

Isn't this just a brute forcing exercise of a (in today's terms) very small key then?

j-pb 55 seconds ago | parent

[delayed]