Seriously though, how did nobody find this? It's not like you needed an LLM to check the random number generator. Given how much interest there was by cryptography people it is surprising.

Did that clanker call us dumb? Scorch the skies, this means war.

This happens in academia all the time. You read a ton of papers, chat with tons of people about tons of ideas.

Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.

Honestly I think this is actually desirable. For a mind to work well and do things creatively and efficiently it can't be a simple search engine, it needs to blend and meld and reform the information.

And that means the output can't be cleanly deterministically linked to the input. Unless you just keep a log then cite everything you've ever read in your life (and all the conversations and talks too).

Sounds entirely reasonable to me. They tried to give some credit. The main contribution is the solution that Claude came up with.

the null hypothesis for Voynich is that it was generated by some random process, like asemic writing, assembling bits from tables and copy/paste/edit. there are some reasons this is plausible (the entropy of Voynich words is low for language, there aren't scribal corrections etc), but fundamentally the "ancient hoax" hypothesis can't be proven, only disproven (since there's so much freedom of choice in generating garbage that it's not a compact explanation.)

so frustratingly, if it is an ancient hoax we can't ever prove it. all we would observe is that we haven't deciphered it, but failing to decipher isn't proof that there's nothing to decipher.

Extremely unlikely - these are very sparse domains.

I have seen nothing that would make me believe there is a "[gag] by the NSA" preventing frontier labs from publishing cryptographic results.

We published HAWK and McEliece attacks no problem.

The conspiracy theory going around the Internet is that they (the AI labs) broke cryptography in some way a la last season of HBO's Silicon Valley, and they're keeping the results under wraps until they can steal Bitcoin out of Satoshi's dead wallets, and then use that to pay for GPUs et al.

Yep.

NIST closed it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/ori...

NSA ignored it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/ori...

I think part of it is I don't know how to write these FOIA requests in the right way they can comply with it. I think you need to be more specific.

probably something like:

"read this: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-bounty/ then find the solution to the bounty"