Article overview of encryption methods from simple ciphers to block ciphers. Covers Caesar cipher, Vigenère cipher, and introduces DES (Data Encryption Standard) created by IBM in the 1970s for protecting financial transactions and bank cards.
Researchers used simulated annealing to decrypt a 500-year-old cipher from a 1542 letter sent by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese to the papal nuncio Giovanni Poggio. The letter, stored in the Vatican Archives, contained a polyalphabetic substitution cipher that had remained unsolved until computational methods were applied to recover the key and plaintext.
Claude Fable 5.1 solved the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher by Sir Thomas Urquhart that had remained unsolved for centuries. The solution uses the 32 Proquiritations in Urquhart's text as a key, where each number in the cipher line indexes a word whose first letter reveals the hidden message: a royalist prayer for King Charles II. Fable 5.1 also deciphered Urquhart's larger Cyphral Octastich using the same principle with numbered pages.
Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes, demonstrating AI capability in search-heavy cryptanalytic tasks. The achievement is presented as evidence of how modern AI excels at problems requiring extensive searching and testing.