Hacker News: elahieh

New comment by elahieh in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

elahieh — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:56:49 +0000

Without a third-party check, nope. Case in point, Chaocipher ... https://www.chaocipher.com/ e.g. see "Progress Report #23" the PDF there. Transcription errors galore!

This cipher context "rhymes" well with Kryptos K4 in many ways.

New comment by elahieh in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

elahieh — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:36:39 +0000

"Caveats, stated plainly"

You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago.

Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication is still pending."

arghhhhh

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/claude-fable-...

New comment by elahieh in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

elahieh — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:27:39 +0000

Unfortunately, the totality of the evidence very much indicates that Sanborn went "buck wild" with the enciphering, he made mistake(s), or both. So this is very much in line with the Chaocipher challenge of 1990. Nice little earner for some people though.

New comment by elahieh in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

elahieh — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:22:16 +0000

I presume what the author did was plug Klaus Schmeh's top 50 unsolved ciphers at https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-un... into Fable 5.1 and ask Fable 5.1 to have a go. On this kind of problem it always falls back to Opus 5 anyway so I save time by starting with Opus.

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...

Racing to solve maths problems now 'pointless'

elahieh — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:23:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-11/racing-to-solve-maths-problems-pointless-tristan-buckmaster-says/107141628

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653867

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by elahieh in "Elevated error rates on Opus 4.7"

elahieh — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:51:35 +0000

One reason might be that Claude Opus 4.7 thinking benchmarks better on Arena Coding at https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/coding ... hopefully that effectively assesses correctness. It doesn't account for reliability though.

Dola-Seed-2.0-Preview debuts at #6 on arena.ai

elahieh — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:34:25 +0000

Article URL: https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/dola-seed-2-0-preview-model-release-on-arena

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040628

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by elahieh in "SCiZE's Classic Warez Collection"

elahieh — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:50:22 +0000

1990 to 1999, that would be exactly the development timeline of Celerity BBS.

Just looking at the revision history of Celerity 2.04 on Discmaster, wow, that went forever!

https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/43430/BBS_Software/DOS...

Kryptos K4 summary and final guesses video

elahieh — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 01:38:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O11UBt4j8TI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974851

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Jim Sanborn open letter to Kryptos community

elahieh — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 22:17:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26229389-adobe-scan-nov-12-2025/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907612

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by elahieh in "Solution to CIA’s Kryptos sculpture is found in Smithsonian vault"

elahieh — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 05:47:42 +0000

Interview with the Smithsonian researchers here

https://zonamotel.substack.com/p/interview-kryptos-k4-uncove...

Solution to CIA’s Kryptos sculpture is found in Smithsonian vault

elahieh — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:56:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/science/kryptos-cia-solution-sanborn-auction.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603876

Points: 158

# Comments: 133

New comment by elahieh in "French firm Gouach is pitching an Infinite Battery with replaceable cells"

elahieh — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 22:43:05 +0000

A cryptography angle in the article. Would this be illegal in the US under DMCA?

One of the biggest compatibility challenges, Vallette said, was finding a way to work with Bosch's mid-drive motors. The communications between a Bosch motor and battery are encrypted; after "a serious effort," Gouach's app and battery should work with them, Vallette said.

New comment by elahieh in "The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale"

elahieh — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 06:55:18 +0000

Also, another example of an "unreasonable" challenge - the "Decipher Puzzle" https://cisa.umbc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/468/2017/09/S... -- from 1983 to 1985.

You would think that one of the lessons of that is that someone could jump in right at the end and solve it after several clues were released. That hasn't worked with K4, which is increasing people's skepticism.

New comment by elahieh in "The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale"

elahieh — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 04:15:41 +0000

Here's what's up for sale from RR Auction

https://www.rrauction.com/jim-sanborn-kryptos-k4-solution-au...

The Wired piece has Sanborn saying the reserve should be "around $300,000."

It sounds like Sanborn really doesn't think it'll be solved before the auction date of 20 November (his 80th is on 14 November). If it does get solved due to this publicity bump, that's huge earnings foregone.

Perhaps he knows it is still an "unreasonable" challenge even with the 24 known letters.

New comment by elahieh in "The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale"

elahieh — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 03:07:39 +0000

Good point, and it's also entirely possible the code designer just did a terrible job. e.g. around 57:00 of https://youtu.be/JOXPYkjvDaA

As Kryptos gots a huge amount of media attention in 1999, references to him changed from "chairman of A cryptographic center" to "chairman of [THE] CIA's cryptographic center" when it doesn't even seem that it has such a center.

And the featured story (around 52:00 of the video) has him apparently claiming credit for helping solve a Caesar cipher!

https://web.archive.org/web/19990501000000*/http://www.tecse...

New comment by elahieh in "The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale"

elahieh — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 02:37:19 +0000

I'm inclining to this too. I heard about it first on Usenet in the 90s, and started looking at it again seriously in June 2017 when I came across the Bauer paper.

But after the 2020 clues (another 13 letters), it became clear that it wasn't any single ACA cipher type, and it was probably something very difficult (because of K4's very low index of coincidence, i.e. 0.036 just below "random" 26-letter text at 1/26, plus the huge number of revealed plaintext letters "in place" i.e. letter-for-lettter correspondence).

That plausibly left a combination of two or more well-known cipher types, but if they were somewhat complex ciphers, the chance of solution would be rather remote.

Hence I always thought a "good" end to the puzzle would be like the book "Masquerade" by Kit Williams where the only guy in cahoots with the creator (Bamber Gascoigne) thought the initial puzzle was an unrealistic challenge, but Williams released clues which enabled two schoolteachers to solve it. So that part was satisfactory, even if hardly anybody remembers the solvers' names!

In contrast, the cribs for K4 haven't helped at all.

The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale

elahieh — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:33:47 +0000

Article URL: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cia-kryptos-sculpture-code-auction-2677451

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907366

Points: 91

# Comments: 53

Most e-scooter riders follow the rules

elahieh — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 02:01:44 +0000

Article URL: https://zagdaily.com/opinion/insight-hub-most-e-scooter-riders-follow-the-rules-heres-what-we-found/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44895986

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by elahieh in "The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001)"

elahieh — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 04:29:49 +0000

I'm rather skeptical of this claim that the data was compressed in 2018 because there is no further information, apart from a hash value given.

If it's a true claim they must have identified some "non-random" aspect of the original data, and then they could have given more info.