GPT-6 Astra decoded a previously unsolved World War I German radio message encrypted with the ADFGVX system, revealing a German text that reports an English cruiser arriving at Sevastopol and an allied squadron following on the 26th. The model used the historical encryption word TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG and reconstructed the Polybius-style substitution table and columnar transposition to produce the plaintext: "EIN ENGLISCHER KREUZER EINLIEG ... SEWASTOPOL ... EIN GESCHWADER DER ALLIIERTEN FOLGT 26STEN," rendered in English as an English cruiser arriving at Sevastopol and an allied squadron following on the 26th. This message appears not to have been decoded previously, joining a set of ADFGVX traffic many others have solved but a dozen or more remained open.
The model’s解cryption followed the procedure in period manuals: alphabetically reorder the key, write the 170-symbol ciphertext under the key in rows of 19 (yielding eight full rows and one short row), derive column lengths (eighteen columns of nine symbols and one of eight), and index into the transposed columns to recover digraphs that map through the ADFGVX square to letters (examples: T’s position yields the 135th ciphertext symbol A, R yields the 108th symbol V, so AV → E). Astra cross-checked historical logs and found HMS Canterbury at Sevastopol on November 24, 1918 and an allied squadron arriving November 26, corroborating the decoded content.
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