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booty • today at 2:38 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

    I am in Rosenow, Rosenow.
From the article:

    After trying many different approaches, GPT–6 
    Astra focused on using the repeated place name 
    ROSENOW ROSENOW as a crib.
This feels extremely underexplained! Why would Astra think to use that as a "crib"? Was it common to repeat the place name in these messages?

(Is it possible that this is a misreported detail? It feels like a singular ROSENOW would be an equally effective crib)

Replies

TheDong • today at 2:48 PM

This was explained in the article right there:

> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message

It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.

In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.

It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.

➕ show 1 reply
JimmyBiscuit • today at 2:52 PM

Rosenow is a municipal (around 32km²) and in there is a district also called Rosenow. So the sender just specified his current position a bit more.

➕ show 2 replies
hmokiguess • today at 2:48 PM

Maybe naive of me, but could it simply just be the overfitting of the same tokens being sent on the input twice because of repetition rather than some unknown implied intelligence.