For 217 Years, Cryptographers Couldn’t Decode Napoleon’s Secret Letter. Then an AI Cracked It in 6 Hours.
AI cracked a Napoleon-era code in 6 hours and is helping researchers read fragile scrolls and 10 million Hebrew manuscript pages.
- AI engineer Carter Church used GPT-6 Astra to decrypt a coded 19th-century letter to one of Napoleon Bonaparte's generals, solving a puzzle unsolved for more than 200 years.
- Historians previously left many ciphers unattended because traditional decryption methods are labor-intensive, but new state-of-the-art AI models have now unleashed dozens of solutions for long-ignored academic archives.
- Automation reveals previously inaccessible data: 14,600 Latin pages from Notre Dame Cathedral archives and 10 million pages of Hebrew manuscripts, with character recognition rates reaching 94 percent.
- Fragile Herculaneum Papyri, carbonized in the Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD, are now being X-rayed and analyzed by AI, enabling research inquiries not previously possible.
- Satoshi Tomokiyo of Cryptiana called 2026 a "turning point" for codebreaking, yet some researchers express mixed feelings as AI solves difficult problems so easily it may drain discovery's satisfaction.
30 Articles
30 Articles
A military letter coded on Napoleon's orders, which remained indecipherable for more than two centuries, finally delivered its secrets thanks to artificial intelligence. ...
An engineer managed to interpret a military letter of 1809 using a model of artificial intelligence; the same technology is also allowing to read papyrus charred by the eruption of Vesuvius.
By decrypting correspondence, artificial intelligence opens up new avenues for historical research.
Artificial intelligence cracks centuries-old ciphers
Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the wartime missive written in code, creating a puzzle that went unsolved for more than 200 years — until artificial intelligence (AI) cracked it in a matter of hours.AI is helping non-specialists unlock the secrets of historical sources, a trend described as a “turning po
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