Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters

A historian says frontier models traced alchemical sources and broke an unsolved 1941 cipher.

After the releases of GPT-6 Sol and Opus 5.5, a historian reports using frontier models on open historical problems rather than transcription alone. GPT-6 Astra identified a French alchemical source for a Latin passage Isaac Newton had translated, and researchers say it deciphered a 10 July 1941 German message by connecting Bundesarchiv radio-message collections that specialists had not fully linked. The author argues the useful problems are digitized, checkable, and suited to multilingual, mathematical, or cryptographic reasoning, and calls for labs and funders to support collaborations with historians. An attempt to interpret John Dee's coded Liber Loagaeth is described as inconclusive in the excerpt.