Claude cracks two 370-year-old ciphers in 44 minutes with zero human help
新智元 · wechat · 2026-09-15
An independent researcher gave Claude Fable 5.1 a 370-year-old unsolved cipher left by 17th-century scholar Thomas Urquhart — one that stumped cryptographers for centuries and ranks among the world's 50 great unsolved ciphers.
- Claude solved it in 44 minutes using 176K tokens with zero human intervention, realizing the key was in the book itself: each number maps to a word in the 32 petitions following the cipher, taking the first letter. The plaintext turned out to be a royalist blessing for King Charles II, two rhyming lines of 32 letters each.
- It then went on to crack the harder 285-digit 'octastich' from Urquhart's The Jewel, mapping numbers to words across the book's 284 numbered pages and writing its own Python scripts to fix typesetting drift, recovering a complete iambic poem.
The takeaway: AI can systematically tackle problems where the answer sits in vast old archives — the bottleneck shifts from intelligence to stamina. ValsAI notes humans must manually search and test methods while AI iterates fast.
Related event: Claude Fable 5.1 Cracks 370-Year-Old Cipher(4 posts)→
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