my new favorite thing to follow is Claude and ChatGPT cracking these unsolved historical mysteries. and they've been on a ridiculous run over the last 2 weeks: > a human + Claude Fable cracked a secret 1644 war plan sent to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. the letter described blocking Ottoman support for Transylvania, mobilizing Moldavia, and supplying 2,000 Cossacks: “I shall by every means prevent the Turk from giving him help… and give him two thousand Cossacks.” > the same project recovered a 10-page intelligence report written one week after the death of King François II of France. it deciphered 98.9% of its 1,715 words from ciphertext alone, revealing 2,000 Protestants taking up arms, rebel captains gathering around the king of Navarre, and a warning that they “would rather die with weapons in hand than be executed by a hangman” > it also read a 1916 telegram to Sun Yat-sen’s household that Japan’s Foreign Ministry couldn’t decipher. it tested all 57,600 possible code tables and recovered 41 of roughly 44 characters: “Chaozhou city has been declared independent by Mo Qingyu. Our force too has recovered Swatow.” > Opus 5.5 downloaded 5,000+ files from Samuel Hartlib’s archive, then sent subagents across Google Books and multilingual archives looking for unidentified sources. it may have found a manuscript Isaac Newton drew on for an alchemy experiment by matching the exact quantities and 2 disguised versions of “Hungarian vitriol.” GPT-6 Astra separately traced a Latin passage written by Newton back to a French alchemical text > OpenAI and Anthropic broke 2 Enigma messages 6 days apart. Astra chose a 1941 message that had resisted solution since 2005, investigated the archives, then wrote its own Enigma simulator and Bombe. it recovered: “Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio.” an Enigma expert verified the break. > 6 days later Claude Opus 5 cracked another: “Convoy back from Corps supply. Hartjenstein. Hartjenstein.” > Astra decoded a German WWI transmission that had remained unread for 108 years. it discovered that the keyword was “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG,” then recovered: “An English cruiser arrived at Sevastopol on the ?4th. An Allied squadron follows on the 26th.” it verified the answer against HMS Canterbury’s original movement logs the cool thing is all of these documents were already sitting in digitized archives. so are millions of other manuscripts, letters, military records, and ciphers that no human historian could ever possibly read, search across, and connect in one lifetime. but frontier models can. and they are just beginning to work through them.