The AI read Napoleon's coded message
A 27-year-old artificial intelligence engineer was able to decode a 19th century letter addressed to one of Napoleon's generals within 6 hours with the latest artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI.
During the war, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered messages to be written and exchanged in code. His work created an unsolved mystery for 200 years until artificial intelligence was able to decipher it in a few hours.
Using Astra's GPT-6 artificial intelligence model, a cyber security engineer was able to discover the encrypted content of a 217-year-old military document from the Napoleonic Wars.
Carter Church, an engineer at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, deciphered the historic message, which had been on the website Cryptiana's list of unsolved historical ciphers for decades.
What makes this amazing is not actually the decoding itself, but the fact that Astra completed the entire process with just one image and one target in about 6 hours.
OpenAI's artificial intelligence understood the structure of this complex code within 6 hours by receiving only a single image and a text command. The deciphered text is an official letter from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy and Napoleon's adopted son, addressed to the French general, Auguste de Marmont, to convey Napoleon's orders to him.
Historical analysis shows that the obtained text completes an incomplete part of Napoleon's diary in 1865. In that book, Napoleon's order to prepare for the invasion of Austria was cut off in the middle of a sentence, which the ciphertext completes with "a gathering of mobs."
"The rest of the code was cracked using the model's own simulated refrigeration solver," Carter Church said of the mechanism for deciphering the 24 lines of fictitious numbers, letters, and symbols.
Satoshi Tomokyo, the director of Cryptiana's database of unsolved historical ciphers, has officially confirmed the discovery and changed the status of this historical document to solved.
What was written in Napoleon's secret letter?
This letter was sent at a time when Austria was preparing to go to war with France to regain its lost lands, and General Marmont was stationed with his corps in present-day Croatia and separated from the main body of Napoleon's army.
The letter contains vital details of the location, combat power and movement of the French and Austrian forces. In this military order, Napoleon urges his general to be ready to march and advance and not to be afraid of a few soldiers or a gathering of thugs.
Part of this letter states:
"Austria will be attacked immediately from all sides. Therefore, he rushes towards his destruction."
These orders allowed Marmon's army to leave Croatia, join Napoleon's main forces and inflict a severe defeat on Austria in the Battle of Wagram; A battle in which the victory earned Marmon the rank of "Marshal".
Inspired by Enigma battle and security concerns
Carter Church noted that he had never attempted to decipher historical documents before, but was motivated to do so after seeing another developer (Carter Leffen) succeed in deciphering a 1941 German army message with artificial intelligence. In that project, the AI was able to decode a message encrypted with the Enigma machine in 10 hours.
Although the decoding of historical documents is of great scientific interest, researchers warn that artificial intelligence algorithms that are able to discover writing patterns and decipher text can be misused in the future to destroy the anonymity of online identities and identify people based on their writing style.