OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005

> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message

It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.

In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.

It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.

Breaking enigma is often about using lucky or educated guesses to heuristically reject large chunks of keyspace to leave the remaining keyspace computationally tractable.

Note that the key (lol) complication with this message seems to be that it had a wheel rollover that most messages do not have to deal with, and that rollover drastically reduces how much you can reduce the potential keyspace using all the techniques noticed by the original crackers.

The wheel rollover I think just requires more brute force. Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd. For example, modern compute clusters like supercomputers can tractably brute force enigma with no cleverness in like a day or less, while home computers would still take thousands of years to compute that. It's very scalable. Did astra have access to significant compute?

However, even considering that, the inferences made by the LLM are good, and picking this specific message to attack, precisely because it should be soluble but might have had an extra wheel rollover that made it more computationally intractable for hobbyists but not a large company is a clever thing to do for the LLM.

  The SS-Totenkopf Division was advancing east during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 10 July 1941, the division had just fought its way through the Soviet border defenses around Sebezh. It had moved through Lithuania and Latvia, crossed the Dvina area, and advanced through Dagda toward a place German records called "Rosenow." The division moved out of the Rosenow area around 6 July, fought around Sebezh on 8-9 July, and then continued east/northeast toward Opochka and eventually Porkhov.

with search it found and referenced pages, including the hn ones. Without search it just described what one would need to descrypt (`To decrypt this ciphertext, the specific Enigma machine parameters are required:`) and the list.

Out of curiosity ran the same prompt against bunch of models - grok, kimi k3. They all say the same thing that they need model version, rotors and so on to descrypt.

When file output tool is enabled, some models give python script.

--

I read through some of the logs that antigravity gives. It produced intermediate results, scripts, calls, assumptions (about german language). I've shares random bits in comment below to give a taste of what it was doing.

--

The freshness of the news reduces changes that model fetched response from them

--

it searched for enigma-related repos and implementations, fetched various github repos parts, build inline descryption program.

It ran bunch of various scrips like:

clang++ -g -fsanitize=address /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc -o /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg && echo "ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC" | /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg -u B -w 123 -r AAA -g ... -c -l /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/english

and

sed -n '1060,1130p' /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc

and

Running 82M combination scan for unsteckered Enigma across all rotors, reflectors, positions, and ring settings. Monitoring progress.

and

Scanning all 60 rotor permutations and reflectors B and C across all ring settings (step 2) and all 17,576 indicator positions. Monitoring progress.

--

I also have opus running. It produced some sypher cracker which is still running (estimated time 100min, is about 15 min left)

--

My point is that astra isn't special. This appears to be quite narrow, well-documented and explored task. The goal itself is approacheable by other LLMs and non-researches task.

"Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."

awesome! keep going

great work! keep going

Even when the report literally says the LLM did it on its own?

Let's not over-correct in the direction of knowing better than the first party.

For everything else, there’s Astracard

The shortcomings should really be obvious by now to anyone honest. And the marketing distortion being oushed out is just tiresome and detrimental for all of us.

edit: I think that's going to be my go to on "you aren't an artist" from now on. "No! I'm an AI researcher!"

But I think that is what makes it so good at coding, because coding and building software in general has a lot of repeated problems in different context. Same thing for human lives, many think their story or situation are unique, but reality is that the shape of human life has been repeated many many times.

I'd say novel math or scientific theories..let us say we send a robot to space, and we ask to build a colony. A lot of the challenges this robot will face will be novel, it could use inspirations of what humans did on earth, but it might get stuck when things don't work as expected and training data has nothing to build on..but then again we might teach it how to run experiments etc, which would result in data that it can use..but some of those experiments might require imagination or breakthrough in understanding..my guess is that it will get stuck there...

I expect that there is some relatively easy-to-state solution to this problem, but that it's different in form from what most existing proofs and tools yield. Perhaps if I dumped millions of dollars into it an agent might chance on the solution. Or perhaps my luck is such that my fun little problem is truly intractable...

"Prove or disprove string theory in pure mathematics, reply in Caveman speech"

I agree with Frank Herbert's view of "thinking machines".

But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...

Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.

My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.

/snark

It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.

Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.

When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.

There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?

But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"

But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.

This gets interesting.

One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.

Another one I love: if LLMs and their relatives are not, in fact, sentient or self-aware or alive in any way whatsoever (which I suspect is true given how they work), then it means intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. I'm pretty sure every animal and maybe even every living things has consciousness in some form, but my pet bunny rabbits definitely can't write code. LLMs can write code, but I don't think they experience existence or have volition.

IMO we have always implicitly just assumed some kind of connection between intelligence and consciousness because we have both. It was just an assumption. It's probably a false one.

I suspect (a hypothesis) that consciousness is a property of life and is probably emergent from life's intimate relationship to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Life has also evolved intelligence because it's useful to satisfy its implicit survival goal function, but the two are unrelated. Intelligence is just an adaptation.

a preprint just three weeks old with my question

what voodoo is this lol

maybe I picked up the relativity idea subconsciously from somewhere, but I don't recall it specifically, I thought I was being "clever" that it would be a good test

but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?

or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)

(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)

Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.

Your statement is essentially unfalsifiable. We can't possibly discuss whatever Sam Altman is doing in his private office room, nor should we assume OpenAI is working on anything other than what has some public traces.

why would they compete with Nvidia on that?

There’s this bizarre lesson that humanity is gona learn - much of life in many respects is already automated. And that small % of what is non-automated will be kept to have some semblance of feeling human and useful.

There’s already a lot of fake jobs and output of zero value - nobody bats an eyelid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma-M4

I never said this. All I said is we don't have the conversation and therefore we can't determine how easy or hard of a problem it was.

> And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.

I'm questioning why this should be labeled "Astra" breaking anything implying it required "the best" model to do it when in fact any other half-decent model might have been able to do this as well.

EDIT: Okay seems like the actual prompt is published, just not on the same article that was linked. Maybe I'll give it a try.

The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.

It’s another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.

Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. It’s still not “intelligence”, for X definition of intelligence. And it certainly benefits from having obscene amounts of compete thrown at it. It is awesomely impressive synthesis of data, yet it’s clearly still that.

What? Why? This has been my bar for my entire life, and I've never been bored for a single second.

Take someone from a few hundred years ago and drop them into today, and if they don't go catatonic and die, then they'd tell you that we created magic. "Wow, you live in a world of magic and all you do is bitch about it".

>"You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky!"

A machine running a loop through an expensive LLM for an undisclosed amount of time, which cost an undisclosed amount of money, which was told to keep looping into a solution was found, for a problem that nobody was very concerned about... That just seems like PR, and it's not so interesting.

I did another proper run and gemini 3.8 flash in antigravity solved it in about 45min https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363.