{"id":630102,"date":"2026-09-20T02:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T02:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630102\/"},"modified":"2026-09-20T02:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T02:30:15","slug":"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-aga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630102\/","title":{"rendered":"ChatGPT-6 Astra cracks 108-year-old unsolved WWI German code for the first time \u2014 radio message sharing enemy movement intelligence had evaded decoding, 1918 Crimean fleet warning verified against HMS Canterbury logs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now 108 years after its transmission, an encrypted World War I German radio message has apparently been deciphered for the first time. The decoded and translated message relays information about the movements of an English cruiser and an Allied squadron near the Crimean Peninsula. Prinz, the developer who reckons they successfully decoded this covert WWI communication, used GPT-Astra<\/a> to solve the cipher.<\/p>\n

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Prinz picked the code<\/a> from a relatively famous list of 50 unsolved ciphers maintained by the German science blogging portal Scienceblogs.de<\/a>. It was known to be \u201cencoded using the ADFGVX method,\u201d says the developer on their Substack.<\/p>\n

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Addressed to the German High Command and for the attention of an admiral or perhaps Naval Command, the ciphered message looks like gobbledygook, surely as intended. The German military at the time used a convoluted grid of letters that shuffled depending on the current keyword.<\/p>\n

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GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, has never been deciphered before.The message below translates to:”EIN ENGLISCHER KREUZER EINLIEG X SEWASTOPOL X S4STEN X EIN GESCHWADER DER X ALLIIERTEN FOLGT 26STEN X”or, in English:”AN\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/8kjDdI2Q5OSeptember 17, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

Astra solved the cipher using the word \u201cTRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG\u201d as the key. This resulted in the decoded message: \u201cEIN ENGLISCHER KREUZER EINLIEG X SEWASTOPOL X S4STEN X EIN GESCHWADER DER X ALLIIERTEN FOLGT 26STEN X.\u201d Translated into English, we can at last understand that the radio message was the following alert: \u201cAN ENGLISH CRUISER ARRIVED AT SEVASTOPOL ON THE ?4TH AN ALLIED SQUADRON FOLLOWS ON THE 26TH.”<\/p>\n

Astra also <\/a>checked its work against military logs. The details about the cruiser\u2019s arrival time aligned with the arrival of the British cruiser HMS Canterbury in Sevastopol, Crimea, <\/a>on November 24, 1918. So the \u2018?\u2019 was perhaps a typo made in transmission. However, the Allied squadron’s arrival date was spot on (November 26), according to the historical records Prinz checked.<\/p>\n

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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 \u201cTRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG\u201d was used only as a key starting December 9, 1918. Remember, this message was transmitted on November 29 of that year.<\/p>\n

This codebreaking <\/a>feat is a cool result and a good example of Astra\u2019s flexible problem-solving capabilities.<\/p>\n

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