'I didn't believe it at first': OpenAI model transcribes, decodes Napoleon's cipher
The Cool Down
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An OpenAI model reportedly solved a 217-year-old Napoleonic cipher from a single scanned image, reconstructing a March 1809 battlefield briefing and correcting the letter's published date. The document was a letter Napoleon Bonaparte sent to General Auguste de Marmont. According to Popular Mechanics, Carter Church, an AI engineer at SentinelOne, had OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra work from a single low-resolution scan, a blurry reproduction from a 1969 French Army journal. The model transcribed and decoded 24 lines of symbols, numbers, and letters. In Church's account, Astra logged about 1,300 hand-drawn marks, sorted them into 155 unique signs, and then solved the homophonic cipher, a format where multiple symbols can stand in for the same common letter. Church said the feat took about six hours to verify.
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