๐ GPT-6 Astra Deciphered a Letter From the Napoleonic Era
On March 16, 1809, as France prepared for war with Austria, Napoleon ordered his stepson, Eugรจne de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, to send General Auguste de Marmont an encrypted report detailing the positions of French and allied armies.
The full key did not survive, so the letter remained unread for 217 years-until engineer Carter Church recently came across it. He had never broken a cipher before, but decided to try with AI. His only source was a low-quality scan from a 1969 French military journal: 24 lines of handwritten numbers, letters, and special symbols.
Astra split the image into lines, recognized the symbols, grouped different handwriting variants into 155 distinct signs, and wrote a program to recover the key. The letter contained 1,300 elements in total.
The model did not start from scratch. Cryptography historian Daniel Tant had previously identified the values of 33 symbols, enough to read about one-third of the letter.โฆ
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- โ 1
- ๐ 1
- ๐ 1
- ๐จโ๐ป 1
- ๐ 1
- ๐ค 1
- ๐ฟ 1