What happened
On 31 August 2026 Vals reported that Claude Fable 5.1, given an open prompt to solve an unsolved historical cipher, recovered Sir Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 Cyphral Distich in 44 minutes. The cryptogram is two lines of 32 numbers at the end of Logopandecteision and had been listed among Klaus Schmeh’s Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages. The recovered rule indexes the i-th number into the i-th of Urquhart’s 32 Proquiritations and takes the first letter of that word, yielding a self-checking royalist distich for Charles II. Fable then applied the same method to Urquhart’s longer Cyphral Octastich (285 numbers in The Jewel, 1652), recovering an ottava rima prayer except for a nine-letter gap the transcriber could not resolve from the EEBO-TCP text. This is a documented historical-puzzle solve, not a new cryptanalytic primitive. The Distich is independently checkable from the printed book; the Octastich still needs a physical 1652 copy for the remaining letters.