AI model cracks 108-year-old World War I cipher

The ciphertext was included in the list of 50 unsolved ciphers on the science blog portal Scienceblogs.de and was encoded using the ADFGVX cipher. The decryption was carried out using the keyword TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG, which had already appeared in open historical sources, so the artificial intelligence did not crack the key from scratch.

The recovered text reports the arrival of a British cruiser in Sevastopol, as well as an allied squadron following behind it on November 26, 1918. The contents were cross-referenced with the logs of the British cruiser HMS Canterbury, which recorded the ship's arrival at the port on November 24, 1918, and that of the allied formation on November 26.

As the developer explained, earlier attempts to decipher the dispatch had failed due to researchers' belief that the key in question only came into use on December 9, 1918, whereas the radiogram is dated November 29. An independent review by cryptographers to confirm the result has not yet been conducted.