How RC2’s π table was made

Khalid Hamadeh shows that the 256-byte PITABLE in Ron Rivest’s RC2 cipher (RFC 2268), and a second unexplained table, are reproduced exactly by a Fisher–Yates shuffle driven by the decimal digits of π, three digits per draw, with code to verify it.

Research · Security · History · Mathematics · Algorithms

The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire

Michele Coscia explains how he and co-authors inferred the economic complexity of the Western Roman Empire from occupations recorded in Latin inscriptions (the LIST dataset), correcting for status and gender biases. Latium scored highest, and Roman-era complexity for modern-country territories correlates significantly with present-day Economic Complexity Index values.

Research · Economics · History · Data Science · Network Science

The MVUEH Break: GPT-6 Astra and a WWII Enigma message unsolved since 2005

Crypto Cellar Research documents how OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra helped break the long-unsolved MVUEH Kriegsmarine Enigma message—methods, cribs, and what the recovered plaintext reveals.

Research · Security · History · Research · AI

Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago?

A PLOS ONE study examines stone points from Obi-Rakhmat Cave and asks whether they indicate early projectile / arrow technology around 80,000 years ago in Central Asia.

Research · Science · History · Research

Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral DistichWe gave Claude Fable 5.1 an open task: solve an unsolved 370-year-old cipher. It solved it within a day.

Vals AI reports that Claude Fable 5.1 solved the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cryptogram by Sir Thomas Urquhart that had resisted solution for centuries. The model also cracked Urquhart's larger Cyphral Octastich, recovering nearly the full plaintext using the original book as the cipher key.

Research · LLMs · AI · Cryptography · History