r/pics 3d ago

"Kryptos: The CIA's Unsolved Enigma Stumping Codebreakers Since 1990"

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5.2k Upvotes

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u/Elieftibiowai 3d ago edited 2d ago

Cant AI do it?

Edit: apparently I am not the only one wondering this, and it doesn't seem far off to ask for it.  Regardless of it was the intention of the creator or not, there seems to be a possibility to use AI for this https://medium.com/@michaelpnaughton/how-i-cracked-the-kryptos-code-a-35-year-mystery-7c46004f61b6

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u/Rebelhero 3d ago

Buddy, what do you think AI is? it's not a miracle, nor actually intelligent. It's just a machine learning algorithm. It cant do anything that hasn't already been done then taught to it.

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u/Elieftibiowai 3d ago

And what are codes? Algorithms. It could do it way faster by trial and error 

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u/pmyatit 3d ago

There's plenty of encryption type things that the best and fastest computers can't decrypt

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u/ikuzusi 2d ago

How do you trial and error a code? You have no way to tell the correct answer from gibberish?

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u/Elieftibiowai 2d ago

Well how did the humans do it? They looked for patterns

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u/ikuzusi 2d ago

This all seems a bit over your head to be honest.

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u/Elieftibiowai 2d ago

Thats why I am asking for clarification, but have only received downvotes 

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u/ikuzusi 2d ago

Alright I'll make an actual attempt.

What you and I call AI are actually Large Langauge Models (LLMs). They are incredibly complicated, but if you boil them down to their fundamentals then what they do is string together words based on how likely they are to appear in sequence from a set of training data. ChatGPT doesn't know anything, it can't process any information or invent anything new, it just responds based on what is in it's training data. This is why you can get ChatGPT to very confidently tell you that 2+2=3 - it doesn't actually have any conception of numbers, it just tries to respond to you naturalistically.

Kryptos is an extremely complicated, multi-layered code that was built with machine codebreaking in mind. If you'd like some specifics on how it works, then this video does a very good job of explaining it. People have been trying to use machines to brute force Kryptos for a very long time, and while it has been useful at some steps (as you can see in the video), the remaining section - K4 - has been completely impenetrable thus far.

An LLM is not going to be of any particular benefit in cracking K4 because it doesn't really know or understand anything, it just spits out words based on how we speak about the topic. Brute forcing K4 hasn't worked yet, and likely won't ever, because it was made to be resilient against that kind of decryption, potentially by encrypting it multiple times in sequence, which would make brute forcing functionally impossible.

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u/Elieftibiowai 2d ago

Thanks for the insight! Even though i still feel like LLMs are not able to solve such problems yet.

Also, comments made it seem like I was just plain stupid to ask this question, when other smarter people than me already used for grok exactly that, regardless of it makes sense, or it makes the right outcome. Its just as much a tool at this point like a pen, to get to the solution on paper 

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u/theDelus 3d ago

And what are codes? Algorithms.

Ah no?