TOKYO \u2013 Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the wartime missive written in code, creating a puzzle that went unsolved for more than 200 years \u2013 until AI cracked it in a matter of hours.<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence is helping non-specialists unlock the secrets of historical sources, a trend described as a \u201cturning point\u201d in a field previously the preserve of scholars and dedicated hobbyists.<\/p>\n
One new sleuth is Carter Church, a 27-year-old AI engineer who decrypted a 19th-century letter to one of Napoleon\u2019s generals.<\/p>\n
Without digital tools, the task could have taken weeks, but the latest model from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI broke the cipher in just six hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat AI mostly brings is persistence,\u201d Church told AFP, saying he felt \u201can unbelievable sense of satisfaction and excitement when I saw the result\u201d.<\/p>\n
The message from 1809 \u2013 detailing French and allied troops\u2019 positions in two dozen lines of symbols, numbers and letters \u2013 had lain ignored in an online academic archive.<\/p>\n
Because traditional, low-tech methods to crack ciphers are effective but time- and labour-intensive, historians \u201chave more important problems to solve, so many ciphers like this often sit unattended\u201d, said Church.<\/p>\n
To find the solution, Church, who works at US cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, needed to learn \u201cvery little\u201d about code-breaking techniques or the historical period.<\/p>\n
He spent some evenings going over it, then consulted Japanese patent engineer Satoshi Tomokiyo, who maintains an online list of unsolved ciphers, to verify it.<\/p>\n
\u201c2026 will be remembered as a turning point for code-breaking of historical ciphers,\u201d Tomokiyo wrote on his website Cryptiana, a go-to resource for the small but enthusiastic global community of amateur cryptographers.<\/p>\n
\u2018Mixed feelings\u2019<\/p>\n
Researchers were already developing AI models to break ciphers, but the public release of state-of-the-art generalist tools has unleashed dozens of new solutions.<\/p>\n
Although Church used OpenAI\u2019s most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, other people have used top offerings from rival US lab Anthropic instead.<\/p>\n
Tomokiyo said that since mid-September, most of the ciphers on his list have been cracked using AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere remain some tough problems\u201d which could stay an enigma for years to come because there is less relevant data available to help AI figure them out, the 58-year-old told AFP.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited long-time problems are now solved, but on the other hand, I have mixed feelings, because AI seems to have solved these difficult problems so easily,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
With technology draining the satisfaction of being first to crack a cipher, a fellow code-breaker told Tomokiyo: \u201cI feel useless.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI is surpassing human abilities in pursuits from mathematics to computer programming, while threatening to alter or even eradicate many jobs.<\/p>\n
The technology is transforming the work of historians not only by decoding documents, but also by analysing millions of medieval manuscripts or helping read ancient scrolls.<\/p>\n
Too fragile to be unrolled without risking destruction, the Herculaneum Papyri \u2013 hundreds of papyrus scrolls carbonised in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD \u2013 are being X-rayed and analysed by AI to reveal the hidden writing inside.<\/p>\n
Researchers in Italy announced in June the first complete virtual unrolling of a scroll, which turned out to be a treatise on ethics.<\/p>\n
\u2018Facebook of the past\u2019<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence is also being used to build a huge, searchable collection of previously inaccessible sources on Jewish history and culture by transcribing 10 million pages of Hebrew manuscripts.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s gigantic. No human being could process such a quantity\u201d of data, said project leader Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.<\/p>\n
Researchers hope the databases created using the digitised text \u2013 which he likens to a kind of \u201chuge Facebook of the past\u201d \u2013 could help bring to light links between people, places and ideas.<\/p>\n
And at the French capital\u2019s Notre-Dame Cathedral, an AI system has been trained to transcribe 14,600 Latin pages from the church\u2019s medieval archives \u2013 a task similar to code-breaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are minutes drawn up by notaries who abbreviate their decisions. The script is highly administrative, very pragmatic… with rather technical vocabulary,\u201d said historian Julie Claustre, who leads the e-NDP project.<\/p>\n
With character recognition rates ranging between 88% and 94%, the project has revealed information about the cathedral\u2019s daily life, its building work, its staff and the care of abandoned children.<\/p>\n
Doing the same by hand would take \u201cseveral decades\u201d, said Claustre, but \u201cit\u2019s not just a time-saver\u201d.<\/p>\n
Automation also enables \u201cinquiries that were not previously possible; it transforms the conditions of research\u201d, she added. AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TOKYO \u2013 Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the wartime missive written in code, creating a puzzle that went unsolved for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":632174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-632173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}