Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News , or add us as a preferred source , to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
hwertz I mean, you'd think previous attempts to decode would have at least tried all known keywords, instead of 'this one wasn't used until a week later' and not even trying it? But good on the model for decoding it! Reply
salgado18 Well, that's impressive! The techonlogy has come a long way since… Oh, wait… GPT-Astra hypothesizes that previous attempts to decipher this German message failed because code sleuths made an incorrect assumption. Before this decoding feat, it was thought that the keyword “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG” was used only as a key starting December 9, 1918. Remember, this message was transmitted on November 29 of that year. So the issue is that no one tried a word they knew? No one thought to try all words irrespective of year not even once? And Astra GTP solved it by reading the year? Nevermind, that was just researcher's fault. Reply
havfy It's good that it was finally solved but it's likely a bit late to be useful since the date has passed. Now that the Germans know that it's been solved, they will likely move on to a new key the next time they decide to take over the world. Reply
Penfolduk Whilst it may seem obvious now, for most of that time the computational resources haven't been available to try loads of words. Especially since, given it's length, it was unlikely to contain earth-shattering information even at the time it was relevant. Let alone decades later. Reply
derekullo salgado18 said: Well, that's impressive! The techonlogy has come a long way since… Oh, wait… So the issue is that no one tried a word they knew? No one thought to try all words irrespective of year not even once? And Astra GTP solved it by reading the year? Nevermind, that was just researcher's fault. It's possible maybe giving a lack of motivation on the researchers behalf that Astra simply outsmarted them. TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG is a 19 letter word which would take a very long time to brute force crack … unless you used a German dictionary attack first. Assuming the Germans weren't using a German word as their code, Astra may have tried other nearby languages like Czech. Reply
Ryrynz Some codesleuths they were.. they didn't even test it against the perhaps either of the known codes around that date? LOL.. That's honestly pathetic. Even a grandma would know to test previous passwords for a login before giving up. The AI didn't actually fully decipher it on it's own either.. It found the right key among historical material that already existed, applied it to the ciphertext, and then independently checked whether the resulting plaintext made historical sense. So this isn't news about how smart Astra is at all, but how stupid and lazy the codeslueths were before giving up. Reply
Artmonkey How is that impressive? Surely today the answer is just written in German somewhere and AI stole it, like it does everyone elses stuff. This sounds like more BS to make AI (which is not AI) sound more capable than it is. Reply
wisecritic Id just like to point out the reason this code wasnt broken was it wasnt in WWI as the article sugfests. The Canturbury sailed after November 11th and arrived on the 24th. The war ended on the 11th. Its mission was to seize a russian battleship to stop it falling intp the hands of the communists during the civil war nothing to do with Germany. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-6-astra-cracks-108-year-old-unsolved-wwi-german-code-for-the-first-time-radio-message-sharing-enemy-movement-intelligence-had-evaded-decoding-1918-crimean-fleet-warning-verified-against-hms-canterbury-logs#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
- Save $300 on this 4K gaming PC with a 9800X3D and RTX 5070 Ti, now $2,599 — powerhouse ABS Stratos II rig ships with 32GB DDR5 and a 2TB SSD
- Skild AI Taps NVIDIA Physical AI to Teach Robots New Tasks From a Single Video
- Jensen Huang says there is '0% chance' AI destroys the world by 2030 — 'We should go as fast as we can, irrespective of anyone else,' dismisses Anthropic doom w
- Cute Critters Come to the Cloud: ‘Aniimo’ Launches on GeForce NOW
- Save $300 on this 4K gaming PC with a 9800X3D and RTX 5070 Ti, now $2,599 — powerhouse ABS Stratos II rig ships with 32GB DDR5 and a 2TB SSD
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.