AI solves 200-year-old napoleonic cipher
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Carter Church, an AI engineer in the US, used artificial intelligence to decipher a coded message from Napoleon Bonaparte from 1809.
The message, detailing troop positions, had remained unsolved for over two centuries before the AI cracked it in six hours. This success reflects a broader trend of AI assisting in the unlocking of historical secrets, previously the domain of specialists.
Historians often left these ciphers unsolved due to the time and effort required to break them manually, but AI offers a persistent approach to the task. Satoshi Tomokiyo, a Japanese patent engineer who tracks unsolved ciphers, believes 2024 will be a turning point for historical codebreaking, noting that most ciphers on his list have been solved by AI since mid-September.
While some codebreakers feel disheartened by the ease with which AI solves these puzzles, the technology is also being applied to other historical challenges. Researchers are using AI to virtually unroll and read carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum, transcribe Hebrew manuscripts, and digitize medieval archives from Notre Dame Cathedral, creating searchable databases of information previously inaccessible to scholars. These projects allow for inquiries and discoveries that would have been impossible with traditional methods.
