AI Cracked a 370-Year-Old Cipher in 40 Minutes — Here's How to Unlock the Same Reasoning Power

Description and use

By enabling deep‑reasoning mode and chaining steps in a pipeline, shallow LLM interactions become thorough multi‑step analyses that uncover hidden contract risks, explain sales drops, pinpoint bug causes, and even crack centuries‑old ciphers.

Problem

Traditional LLM interactions are shallow and miss deep reasoning needed for complex tasks such as cryptanalysis, contract risk analysis, sales anomaly diagnosis, and production bug root cause identification.

Outcome

Enabling thinking mode and using pipelines transformed shallow LLM interactions into deep, multi‑step reasoning, enabling the discovery of hidden contract risks, accurate sales anomaly explanations, and precise bug root causes, while also cracking a centuries‑old cipher.

Workflow

• 1. Install Bailian CLI and authenticate with API key
• 2. Run a single thinking request: bl text chat --message "Analyze the logical flaws in this argument" --model qwen3.8-max --enable-thinking --thinking-budget 8192
• 3. For complex tasks, define a YAML pipeline with steps and dependencies
• 4. Validate the pipeline with bl pipeline validate --file <file>
• 5. Execute the pipeline with bl pipeline run --file <file> --dry-run (or without dry‑run for real execution)
• 6. Optionally upload domain knowledge with bl knowledge create --name "cipher-history" and bl knowledge doc upload --file ./papers/
• 7. Use bl knowledge chat to query the knowledge base during reasoning
• 8. Review and iterate on the pipeline until the desired insight is achieved

Evidence

Claude Fable 5.1 cracked the Cyphral Distich — a cipher that's been unsolved since the 1650s. 370 years of human failure. 40 minutes of AI reasoning.

Source

Fable didn't "guess" the cipher. It ran a multi-step reasoning chain: frequency analysis → hypothesis generation → verification → elimination → narrowing.

Source