On March 16, 1809, while Napoleon was preparing for war against Austria, a coded military message left Paris. The first line was in plain French. The other 24 were a hieroglyphic jumble of two-digit numbers, letters, and symbols.
According to Euronews, the emperor did not write it in his own hand: it came from the headquarters of his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy of Italy, on Napoleon’s orders, and was meant to reach General Auguste de Marmont, whose troops were in Dalmatia, present-day Croatia. The guide to deciphering it was lost and, according to media reports, no one read it again for 217 years.
Until now. Cybersecurity engineer Carter Church, of SentinelOne, says he gave GPT-6 Astra a single image and a single prompt. It was a low-resolution reproduction from 1969, with some 1,300 hand-drawn signs. According to his blog, the model divided the sheet into rows, read each mark, decided which of the 175 were the same sign written twice, and only then began breaking the cipher. All in about six hours.
According to The Telegraph, the text discusses the movements and numbers of French and Austrian troops on the eve of the war. For now, the finding is Church’s claim, without independent verification.