TL;DR: all keys are known because the list was seized after the war. However, this message was not previously decoded because the German operator mistyped the key, and also used a key from the wrong day.

This meant that ChatGPT didn't need to brute-force the entire key, just pick the correct one from the list and identify the typo.

A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

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roenxi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

Isn't that something of a given? If possible then a sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done it. If impossible, ChatGPT couldn't have done it. Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them.

The only real learning here is another example of a task that would have required intelligence up until an AI does it, then we suddenly discover that analysts don't do anything requiring general intelligence.

	▲	j_maffe an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not sure I agree. More is different. Being able to execute logic at a higher scale and speed would make some previously infeasible intelligence tasks possible, resulting in a new level of intelligence.
	▲	gnfargbl an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Most contemporary stories around AI include the implication that AI did something humans couldn't. This is because the big players have been shilling AGI hard for a while, and their valuations depend on maintaining the sentiment that serious progress in that direction is being made.

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YeGoblynQueenne an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm sorry, where does it say the German operator mistyped the key? The article says indeed that the message remained unsolved because it was sent on the wrong date, but I can't see the bit about the mistyping anywhere.

	▲	Almondsetat an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Is the ?4th a date?

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msy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't this just a brute forcing exercise of a (in today's terms) very small key then?

	▲	xeromal 38 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's doing something that wasn't worth the squeeze for a human. Seems like a perfect use case for AI. Sure, I can do X or I can do Y but if it takes me a few weeks but AI can hash it out in hours, it now makes it worth it.
	▲	red75prime an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Can we stop using "brute force" for designating "tour de force"?

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j-pb 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We've moved the goalpost for AI often enough that even being as capable as "a sufficiently dedicated human analyst" is not considered noteworthy.

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rplnt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It obviously is? See above. Or do you not feel the clarification is important? AI being able to solve things no human bothered to try is great, but it is very different from AI solving things humans tried to solve and failed. And the latter is what pops to mind seeing these titles.

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YeGoblynQueenne an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait a minute. We've had AI that is as capable as a human and even more so since the 1950's.

I keep banging on that drum but the first AI system to prove mathematical theorems was Logic Theorist by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, presented at the Dartmouth conference that named the field of AI in 1956. Wikipedia says:

Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of [Alfred North] Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a new and shorter proof for Theorem 2.85.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist

The first system to outperform human experts in medical diagnosis was MYCIN, an Expert System from the early 1970's at Stanford. Wikipedia again:

An evaluation of MYCIN was conducted at the Stanford Medical School. The first phase of the evaluation consisted of 10 test cases of diverse origin, chosen by a physician who was not acquainted with MYCIN's methods or knowledge base. These cases were presented to 7 physicians and 1 senior medical student. 10 prescriptions were compiled for each of the cases, 1 recommended by MYCIN, 1 prescribed by the treating physician at the county hospital, and 8 by the aforementioned individuals. The second phase of the evaluation consisted of eight infectious disease specialists being provided the clinical summary and set of 10 prescriptions for each of the 10 cases and tasked to provide their own recommendations for each case and assess the 10 prescriptions. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65%, which was comparable to the 42.5% to 62.5% rating of five faculty members.[9] This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about therapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment.[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin#Results

And then of course there's the long history of human-dominating AI players for traditional board games starting with DeepBlue's win against GM Gary Kasparov in 1996.

Again: we've had that sort of AI for a long, long time now.

It would be great if any claim of "moving goalposts" has better be very well informed about the history of AI and its accomplishments, as well as its failures, first.

	▲	j-pb an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The main difference between the systems you list and the systems that we have today is closed world reasoning on very narrow formalised tasks, vs. open world common sense reasoning on open ended tasks with vast search spaces. Common sense is ironically the hard part of AI, not the fix-point rule application. So any exclamation of "it was just using common sense", is missing the forrest for the trees.