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elahiehyesterday at 10:22 PM2 repliesview on HN

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...


Replies

chr15myesterday at 11:48 PM

You should probably read the article if you want to know the answer. It's in the section called "elicitation".

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notpachetyesterday at 11:49 PM

Cipher noob question: is there any check that can be done to ensure a cipher is actually decodable? What if the author made a flaw when encoding it, so that it's not actually solvable?

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