Artificial Intelligence
Claude Fable 5.1 solves 1653 number puzzle
The Decoder reported that Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 was said by Vals AI to have solved Sir Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 Cyphral Distich, though the article said humans could have done it too.
- The article said Sir Thomas Urquhart published the Cyphral Distich in 1653.
- It said the puzzle consisted of two lines of 32 numbers each.
- According to Vals AI, Claude Fable 5.1 solved it in 44 minutes without human help.
- The article said the solution involved using the numbers to point to words in 32 sections of Urquhart’s book.
- It said the hidden message read: "O God uphold King Charls the Second and make him the supreme ruler of this land."
The article said Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 had solved a number puzzle that had remained unresolved. It attributed the result to Vals AI, which said the model did it in 44 minutes without human help.
The puzzle was the Cyphral Distich by Sir Thomas Urquhart, published in 1653. The article said it contained two rows of 32 numbers.
According to the article, each number referred to a word in one of the publication’s 32 sections. The first letters of those words formed a royalist message supporting King Charls the Second.
The article said Vals AI had spent months testing other frontier models on unsolved puzzles and that none had produced a verifiable answer. It also said Claude Fable 5.1 had found the Cyphral Distich by looking through problems on its own.
Named in this story
People
- Sir Thomas Urquhart
- authored the 1653 number puzzle
Companies
- Anthropic
- was the maker of Claude Fable 5.1
Organisations
- Vals AI
- said the model solved the puzzle in 44 minutes
Products and systems
- Claude Fable 5.1
- was the model said to have solved the puzzle
- Cyphral Distich
- was the 1653 number puzzle the model was said to decode
How the source tells it
The piece was written in a promotional, hype-led register, using an apparent breakthrough claim and a polished product narrative to make the result feel more significant than the evidence alone showed.
- hype a breakthrough claim was presented through marketing-style wording and a headline built around a dramatic decode
- speculation presented as fact a tentative claim was repeated as if established, without independent verification in the article
- novelty the story leaned on an unusual old puzzle being matched with a new model