{"rewrite":{"id":"r_f588efd68ad9e2143d331798","clusterId":"c_ac67463be828cc6882875f73","slug":"claude-fable-5-1-solves-370-year-old-cyphral-distich-cipher-in-44-minutes","model":"deepseek-v4-1-flash","headline":"Claude Fable 5.1 Solves 370-Year-Old Cyphral Distich Cipher in 44 Minutes","summary":"The AI model Claude Fable 5.1 deciphered the Cyphral Distich, a two-line cipher that had gone unread for over 370 years, in 44 minutes and 176,000 tokens. Researcher Gabe Jaffe wrote up the method. The cipher sits at the end of Sir Thomas Urquhart's 17th-century Logopandecteision, after a list of 32 \"Proquiritations,\" and the model found the key in that number and the word \"wish.\"","whyItMatters":"The solve leans on an internal clue Urquhart wrote into his own book rather than on external cryptanalysis, which is the kind of contextual reading that stalled human cryptographers on this text since it was posed as an unsolved problem in 1899.","webCardHtml":"\u003cp\u003eThe rule Claude Fable 5.1 landed on: for the i-th number in the ciphertext, go to the i-th Proquiritation and take the first letter of the word at position n. The first number is 5, and the fifth word of the first Proquiritation is \u0026#34;of,\u0026#34; giving \u0026#34;o.\u0026#34;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTwo findings drove the solve. The ciphertext sits directly after Urquhart\u0026#39;s phrase \u0026#34;32 Proquiritations,\u0026#34; and the number 32 recurs, so the model treated it as a key. The poem next to the cipher says an honest reader will find there \u0026#34;the wishes of his own heart and the author\u0026#39;s thoughts,\u0026#34; which pointed the search inside the book instead of outside it.\u003c/p\u003e","blueskyPost":"The Cyphral Distich key was the number 32 and the word wish. Claude Fable 5.1 found it in 44 minutes and 176,000 tokens, a cost small enough that treating historical ciphers as routine compute is now defensible.","twitterPost":"Claude Fable 5.1 cracked the Cyphral Distich using the text's own 32 Proquiritations. The cipher's structure gave up the key.","threadsPost":"Claude Fable 5.1 read the Cyphral Distich in 44 minutes by treating the 32 Proquiritations and the word wish as the key material. Gabe Jaffe documented the method. The larger consequence is that a puzzle untouched for over 370 years now costs 176,000 tokens.","newsletterBlurb":"The Cyphral Distich, a 32-number cipher printed after Sir Thomas Urquhart's list of 32 Proquiritations, had resisted cryptographers since it was posed as an unsolved problem in Notes and Queries in 1899. Claude Fable 5.1 decoded it in 44 minutes using 176,000 tokens. Gabe Jaffe wrote up the method: the model took the i-th number, found the i-th Proquiritation, and pulled the first letter of the n-th word.","attributionJson":"[{\"source\":\"GIGAZINE\",\"url\":\"https://gigazine.net/news/20260917-fable-solves-cyphral-distich/\",\"title\":\"Claude Fable 5.1 Deciphers 370-Year-Old Undecoded Cipher \\\"Cyphral Distich\\\" in Less Than a Day\"}]","lintFlagsJson":null,"lintHits":0,"costUsd":0,"inputTokens":4872,"outputTokens":721,"status":"published","repairAttempts":0,"nextRepairAt":null,"factsAttemptedAt":1789595966,"createdAt":"2026-09-16T21:55:58.000Z","publishedAt":"2026-09-16T21:58:22.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-16T21:58:22.000Z"},"cluster":{"id":"c_ac67463be828cc6882875f73","canonicalTitle":"Claude Fable 5.1が370年前の未解読暗号「Cyphral Distich」を1日足らずで解読","representativeArticleId":"a_390116d46821f87e2bf0c1eb","sourceCount":1,"writtenSourceCount":1,"writeAttempts":0,"isSolo":true,"entitiesJson":"{\"anime_titles\":[],\"manga_titles\":[],\"work_titles\":[\"Cyphral Distich\"],\"studios\":[],\"people\":[\"Gabe Jaffe\"],\"type\":\"news\",\"domain\":\"other\",\"is_roundup\":false}","contentType":"news","status":"published","firstSeenAt":"2026-09-16T21:00:00.000Z","lastSeenAt":"2026-09-16T21:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-16T21:58:20.000Z"},"attribution":[{"source":"GIGAZINE","url":"https://gigazine.net/news/20260917-fable-solves-cyphral-distich/","title":"Claude Fable 5.1が370年前の未解読暗号「Cyphral Distich」を1日足らずで解読"}],"entities":{"anime_titles":[],"manga_titles":[],"work_titles":["Cyphral Distich"],"studios":[],"people":["Gabe Jaffe"],"type":"news","domain":"other","is_roundup":false},"keyFacts":null}