Just now, GPT-6 Astra has cracked Napoleon's century-old unsolved case!

Just now, GPT-6 Astra has decrypted a 217-year-old Napoleon cipher letter, shocking the entire internet.

In 1809, a top-secret letter written by Napoleon was sent across the Adriatic Sea.

For 217 years, this letter has remained an unsolved cold case in the cryptography community. It consists of 1,300 hand-drawn symbols that look like incomprehensible scribbles, and has long occupied the "Unsolved Cold Cases List" on the authoritative cryptography website Cryptiana. Top cryptography experts around the world all lamented that "there is no way to start working on it".

On this 1202 × 1836 pixel image, each cipher symbol takes up a mere 19 pixels on average.

Until last week, an AI engineer who knew nothing about cryptography casually fed GPT-6 Astra a blurry black-and-white image along with a prompt.

Only 6 hours later, this cipher letter was decrypted!

Napoleon's original troop deployment map was brought back to light, and even the half imperial edict in his memoir that had been censored, pixelated and interrupted for a full 160 years was perfectly "completed" word for word by AI.

Faced with Astra's powerful multimodal capabilities and long-range autonomous planning, the barriers that prevented humans from discovering hidden knowledge have been completely shattered.

The 217-year-old deadlock: a blurry image and the erased memoir

In the spring of 1809, the whole of Europe was shrouded in the shadow of war, and the Austrian Empire was preparing to launch a fatal strike against Napoleon.

On the other side of the Adriatic Sea, Napoleon's close friend Marshal Marmont was leading 13,000 of the most elite French troops. Once the war broke out, Marmont's forces would be left stranded with no reinforcements available.

On March 16, Napoleon ordered a top-secret military report to be sent to Marmont, informing him of the exact garrison locations of all French and allied troops. He specifically instructed: "This letter must be written in cipher and escorted by an extremely intelligent officer."

This top-secret letter successfully passed through the war zone and has been preserved to this day. However, it also became a complete "book from heaven" that no one could understand.

Except for the first sentence which is normal French ("General Marmont, you should have received my letters dated the 8th, 14th and 20th of this month..."), the rest of the content is 24 full lines of dense two-digit numbers, scattered letters and weird symbols created out of thin air.

The cipherbook was lost long ago in the war. In the 217 years that followed, no one could understand this letter. It was listed on the "Unsolved Historical Ciphers List" on the famous cryptography website Cryptiana.

Because its only surviving copy is nothing more than a low-resolution black-and-white photocopy published in a French military magazine in 1969.

With no clear text and no exact key available, human experts were stumped when faced with 1,300 hand-drawn symbols and 155 independent ideographic units.

Cryptography expert Daniel Bourdeau tried to challenge this letter a few weeks ago but finally gave up: "There is simply no way to start. Apart from this blurry image, I can't find any basis to carry out my work."

Until the appearance of an "outsider".

The barrier breaker and the 6-hour miraculous operation

The person who broke the 217-year-long deadlock is a young man named Carter Church.

He is a senior AI engineer at the cybersecurity company SentinelOne, not a historian, and has never decrypted any cipher before.

A week ago, he learned that Carter Leffen, a layman in the field of cryptography, spent about 10 hours using GPT-6 Astra to decrypt an unsolved Enigma cipher of the German Army in World War II that had remained a mystery for decades.

Out of curiosity about the capability boundary of large language models, he made a crazy decision: to send this unsolved human cold case to GPT-6 Astra for processing.

The prompt is very simple: provide a blurry black-and-white image, and then ask the AI to decrypt it.

Over the next 6 hours, GPT-6 Astra demonstrated its amazing long-range autonomous planning capability.

Step 1: Epic-level visual transcription

With no existing text available for analysis, Astra directly performed line-by-line segmentation on this 1202×1836 pixel ancient image.

It carried out precise line-by-line cropping of the 1202×1836 pixel image, and extracted 1,300 cipher units in a straightforward manner.

The most astonishing part is that it keenly identified the writing deviations of the ancient scribe. It determined that some ink marks that looked different were actually "connected characters" or "slips of the pen" of the same symbol.

Eventually, the AI accurately classified these 1,300 hand-drawn garbled codes into 155 independent ideographic symbols.

In the human world, this step alone of visual comparison would make paleography experts strain their eyes for months.

Step 2: Anchoring of the incomplete key

After the transcription was completed, Astra did not attempt to crack the cipher blindly and forcefully.

Among the vast amount of historical internet data, it automatically associated and retrieved an incomplete table once sorted out by French cryptography historian Daniel Tant.

Astra extracted 33 known letters from it as "anchors" for decryption. Then, it keenly spotted the 10-letter word "CONSEQUENT" (meaning "therefore") in the 14th line of the letter.

This one-third of known information allowed it to "lever the whole earth".

Step 3: Writing its own code to decrypt

What about the remaining 865 unknown symbols? This is a type of "homophonic cipher" — high-frequency letters (such as e, a) correspond to several completely different symbols, which means that the traditional "word frequency statistics method" completely fails.

Astra did not get stuck. It directly wrote a solver based on the "simulated annealing algorithm" by itself.

To verify whether the decrypted French is smooth and natural, it even called the literary works of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, as well as the memoirs of Marshal Marmont himself, extracted the 19th-century French statistical features (3-gram, 5-gram) to carry out high-frequency cross-comparison!

Step 4: Discovering high-dimensional logical "hidden words"

During the intensive calculation, Astra found that if some symbols were treated as "single letters", the translated French would be extremely awkward.

It immediately carried out cognitive upgrading and made a bold assumption: some symbols do not represent letters at all, but entire words!

Soon, 29 special symbols were identified by it — they respectively represent high-frequency French words: de, que, les, vous, général and so on.

Step 5: Closed-loop self cross-validation

After the first version of the translation was generated, Astra did not rush to submit the result. It used the decrypted results to go back to the blurry original image again, re-substituted the decrypted value of each symbol into the entire letter, to ensure that all contexts are completely smooth without any flaws.

Six hours later, a complete two-way cipher comparison table (containing 115 letter symbols and 27 full-word symbols) and the translated plaintext were neatly displayed on Carter's screen.

Satoshi Tomokiyo, the founder of the famous cryptography website Cryptiana, announced shockingly after receiving this code package with detailed verification scripts: this cold case has been officially solved!

Echoes of history: Napoleon's hidden arrogance and the erased sentence

So what exactly was written in this letter that had slept for 217 years?

After the cipher letter was decrypted, it can be seen that it is a pre-war briefing, which accurately notified the troop deployment of several French marshals (such as Davout, Massena, etc.), and arrogantly predicted: "Austria is accelerating towards its own destruction."

But what excited historians most is that it filled a 160-year-long blank.

In 1865, The Collection of Napoleon's Letters was published in France.

There is a sentence in the book that was interrupted strangely: "Marmont must not be intimidated by a handful of ...... (par une poignée de . . . . . . . .)."

For 160 years, no one knew what Napoleon's original words were. Was the original manuscript illegible? Or was it "censored" by the editors of the Second French Empire?

Now, AI gives the uncensored answer: "You must never be intimidated by a small number of enemy troops, or a mob of riff-raff (un rassemblement de canailles)."

This word fully reflects Napoleon's undisguised contempt for the Austrian militia.

Marshal Marmont, who received this letter, fought bravely in the Battle of Wagram later and was awarded the title of Marshal by Napoleon.

However, when the allied forces pressed on towards Paris in 1814, it was this close friend of Napoleon who privately reached an agreement with the anti-French coalition, leading to the fall of Paris and forcing Napoleon to abdicate directly.

In French, a vocabulary "raguser" (derived from Marmont's title) was even created, which means "betrayal".

This letter witnessed the last afterglow of the empire.

Thought-provoking: The "professional barriers" crushed by AI

Moreover, several other century-old cold cases have also been decrypted by Astra recently.

Faced with the German Enigma cipher machine, Astra even independently retrieved World War II archives, wrote a set of Python code to run a simulator, and conquered it in only 10 hours.

Faced with the German WWI radio garbled codes that had slept for 108 years, Astra also found the little-known key.

In just a few weeks, Astra moved forward unimpeded, cracking the most intractable problems in the human century-long history of cryptography one by one.

At the end of his blog post, Carter Church wrote a profound insight:

This cipher itself is not difficult in mathematics