The Misinformation Misadventures of Cicada 3301

Hello. Uh welcome everybody to the misinformation misadventures of Cicada 3301. Now this talk Oh, thank you. Uh this talk will also be discussing disinformation. I just couldn't really make the alliteration work in the title. Uh now just a quick little uh housekeeping. Misinformation information that is shared intention uh mis uh excuse me not intentionally um that is wrong. Right. A student asked me the other day, "Mr. Bird, where does air come from?" If I had said the clouds, but I really did believe that it came from the clouds. Well, I didn't mean to mislead that student, but I did. If [snorts] instead uh uh I told a student that horses can run faster uphill because I enjoy the ponderous

look in their eyes, that is definitely disinformation. Uh tell all your friends that it's really they'll believe it. Now, as I said, welcome to Misinformation, Misadventures of Cicada 3301. Uh my name is the clockwork bird. For my day job, I am an educator in Maryland. I am 100% not in tech. Uh I am a part of the cicada solvers community. I function as a kind of community organizer. I've been there for about six years bringing together people trying to solve a really hard puzzle. That puzzle being released by Cicada 3301. I keep on saying that name, [snorts] but I'm going to tell you a little bit about Cicada. Cicada in brief. I I might have bought a pair and they didn't fit.

That's all right. But Cicada is the name of a mysterious organization that released a series of increasingly complex cryptographic challenges between 2012 and 2014, ultimately culminating in the release of 2014's Libra Primus, a book of 58 pages encrypted in rooms with a deep web hash to boot. It's been 12 years. We'll solve it one day. I think I I hope uh we're going to be going into a little bit more depth about Cicada 3301. So, um what let's move on. Okay. Now, guys, don't tell don't tell nobody I told you this. Okay. Now, if we want to understand where privacy comes from, really it's enumerated from this thing called Connecticut v Griswald. Okay. This is this is a thing that

essentially allowed you know that privacy is enumerated for the constitution. But not really talking about that. Actually, what I really want to talk about is this thing called the cipher pucks. Okay, this really cool group of people who were like, "Hey, people should have strong public cryptography. That's cool." Uh, but we're not actually going to talk about the cipher pucks. It's just the cicas philosophically aligned with the cipher pucks. Okay, so in 2012, they released this thing on 4chan and and you would go into the metadata of bat image and from there you you would get to an img link from the link. You would use steganography on this decoy duck and then you would get to a Reddit and use

my numerals on the luckily the whole talk won't be that. But what I'm trying to illustrate here is that there is a lot of information under the cicada umbrella. And crucially, the amount of information here is what made Cicada vulnerable to people who wanted to take advantage of the imagery for their own ends. In this talk, we will be discussing first why Cicada gained such public attention and then talking about how that attention was co-opted. In order to explain to you why Cicada was so popular on a main stage, you know, on a on a global stage, I'd first like to tell you the story of how I found the puzzles in 2018. I was smoking a doob in my

college dorm room. Saw this cool thing on Cicada uh on a YouTube channel called The Great Big Story and I was like, "Hey man, this is really cool." I was studying anthropology at the time. You know, Cicada was this cool group, you know, wow, like an artifact of the digital age. It's really interesting to me. Uh a year later, I was [snorts] getting a tattoo in South Africa of a rune from Bloodborne. If any Bloodborne fans here, >> yes, we grant us eyes. Am I right? Oh, wow. That was really loud. But [laughter] um and I remember I was sitting in the chair gritting through the pain. Runes just Oh, yeah. Yeah. Remember that thing with runes you saw like a year

ago? Great big story. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Uh next year the pandemic started and it was a lot for me. I was in college at the time, had to drop out because it wasn't, you know, I couldn't do classes with distant learning. And in order to ground myself, I stumbled across something called co-ams. These are zen tools that a practitioner can use to push themselves out of their minds and into a place of experience. Undoubtedly, everybody here has heard a co- before. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Yeah, that's not actually what it is, though. But it's fun. If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it still make a sound? No. But

I was just looking up co-ands, you know, trying to ground myself. And one day I found a co-an that Cicada had made and I was like, "Hey, I remember this thing. I have all this free time. You know what? I'm going to dive into this. I also just want to draw your attention uh to a line. The eye is the voice of the circumference from the voice of my own circumference kind of deal. probably why the brief didn't fit. [snorts] But that was a line that really connected with me. And what I want to illustrate is that my ingress into the rest of cicada was from a place that connected with my spirituality. And this is going to be a theme. A lot

of people end up finding a personal connection with the puzzle. Well, I was excited. I wanted to do something with this energy and what I ended up doing was going on to Google and typing in our deep web hash. Um, I didn't really have an understanding what indexed and unindexed meant at the time. You cannot simply find our deep web hash by typing it into Google. [snorts] H well, I didn't know that. And I stumbled across a YouTube video that had the deep web hash in the title. And I was like, [gasps] did I find a piece of the puzzle? Oh my gosh, I can help. And I went on to our Discord. Well, I found a Discord first,

I think, through our Reddit. And I popped on the Discord and I posted this video. And as you can see here, it was uh a different version of this. It was the colors were in negative, but it was Bruce Lee saying, you know, you'll miss you miss the moon if you look at your finger, which is ironic seeing what will come next. went on to the Discord and I posted it very excited. Guys, I found something. And then uh one of our staff members and now one of my best friends said, "Hey man, that's bullshit." So you can even see see how it says 3302 in the title. We're 3301. I went, "Oh, my bad." But I

didn't feel ashamed, you know, they didn't shame me for that. They pointed me in the right direction. you know, they saw this passion and I ended up really getting into the puzzles and into the community and now I can't stop talking about cicada damn bugs. But what happened to me is actually what happens to a lot of people when they engage with ARGs or alternate reality games, also augmented reality games. So, I'm going to kind of step back from Cicada for a moment to just mention the anatomy of the ARG, right? You have these compelling narratives that can be wrapped in some cryptographic material that entice a player to engage both digitally and in the real world.

One of the very first ARGs is Ang's hat, which was a project where they [snorts] used the name of a New Jersey town and made it mysterious. New Jersey is mysterious enough to me. And it was this whole thing about Princeton scientists discovering a time travel method. It was wild. But they made this puzzle, this ARG, to see how far a conspiracy could spread. People still talk about monks hat. People still think that those physicists really did make a time travel device called the egg. They did not. Now we see I love bees which was tacked on at the end of the trailer for Halo 2. And on this website, you know, mysterious information almost looked

like it was getting hacked. The very first day 200,000 people saw the site. Next day it was 500,000. By the third day was about a million people. It was incredibly effective at getting people interested in Halo. So here we see that ARGS can have a use to just test to see how people react to market material. Um the examples I usually give is um you know you are posed as a secret agent trying to intercept communications from a rival state. you know, you do this and you'll stop nuclear war. Or maybe you are part of the few that can solve, you know, prevent a environmental catastrophe by committing corporate espionage. Right? These are some examples.

And crucially, right, there is a narrative that the person is following. I am a secret agent. I am a environmentalist. [snorts] Cicada does something a little different. And as we can see there at the top, I have the acronym TNAG or this is not a game. And part of the appeal of ARGS is that it breaks down that A where that boundary between what you know is real and what you are imagining breaks down. And Cicada did an incredible job of situating itself as an ARG without the A, just a reality game. As we go throughout the talk, I'm going to be demonstrating how they did this. That facet is so crucial as to why it

was attractive to threat actors. Now, we're going to zoom back in. So in 2012 of all places they posted on 4chan, "Hello, we are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it through." Oh, cool. I want to be highly intelligent and and join a a small group of people. But crucially, what Cicada is doing is that from the get-go, they're connecting with somebody on an emotional level. It's an appeal to pathos. Everybody wants to prove themselves, especially 4chan in 2012. You want to prove yourself to be that

highly intelligent person. And as the puzzles continue to go on, this theme of being able to connect with the individual and have them question their kind of role in the environment increases. So, a few days go by and they uh solvers make it to a website and they see this countdown here. Um, and after it gets to zero, uh, everybody is greeted with these a list of coordinates all across the world. All of these posters came up simultaneously. And that's when it was like, oh, these are not just some random people on 4chan trying to like play a little game, okay? They're putting some pretty big effort into it. Now, right, as we said earlier,

it's this bridging the gap between the digital and the material. And this really got people going, oh my gosh, who has the capacity to do this all in one night? Who has that? These take quite a bit of resources. No. Was this a group of people? Was this one person who was traveling on a plane? And how did they do it? And as solvers would continue to go through the puzzles, this is when we start to get a little esoteric with it. I'm going to mention a few of the references that they make throughout the puzzle. Oh, whoopsies, wrong order. Um, at the end of 2012, they uh said to the round winners, this is a PGP verified communication that was

shared between Cicada and solvers. We know that this communication is real. And they said, "We are an international group. We're like a think tank. We're interested in researching and developing tools and techniques that can forward our goals. Liberty, privacy, security." That's pretty good. This is the evidence as well that this is not a game. Maybe this is just narrative trappings to get people into it, but they are showing they are a real group and they really do have a vested interest in doing something broader. This is not a game. They really are recruiting. This is also, as you see on big letters, always verify PGP. early on uh I believe it was in 2012 they said from now from

here on out we'll be cryptographically signing with a PGP [clears throat] key so you know it's us um PGP is not broken I want to say that right now uh a lot of the claims that are levied against the puzzle or that kind of people try to use as an inn is oh you know PGP is broken I'm the real cicada but we're we're not quite there yet so we have this mysterious group [snorts] Seeing that it's not a game, we really are looking for people. And this definitely entered the zeitgeist, at least of the Cicada solvers at the time. And as solvers go through the years, now we're really getting hit with some he

heavy esoteric material. On the left, we have William Gibson's a grip a book of the dead. In the middle, we have Williams Blake, the voice of the devil from the marriage of heaven and hell. and the most esoteric of them all, Alistister Crowley. And uh just as a little fun fact, all of these things are pretty, you know, we have a Grippa, he literally says William Gibson says the terms esoteric. Grippa book of the dead is named after a grimoire. Blake is talking about reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy. Alistister Crowley is talking about in the sphere I am everywhere the center as she the circumference is nowhere found. Remember how earlier I mentioned that

co-an the eye is the voice of the circumference. What the hell are they talking about? They really like this term. But we're seeing now that they are using material that is more spiritually pointing. Eventually, they released a series of questions that they wanted solvers to answer. And what's interesting about these questions is that they challenge somebody's notion of how they operate within reality. There is no truth. What you are is more important than what you do. Can't step in the same river twice. Once again, I am the voice inside my head kind of deal that they're asking questions that are posing how somebody relates to the real world. I'm sorry reading that. And for solvers at the time, this was

pretty big. You know, talking to members of the community, this was something that really did make them think about how they were acting in the real world. And these questionnaires were used by Cicada to determine who was going to join the group. One moment. It's incredibly warm up on stage, so I'm going to take off one of my shirts. Sorry. I planned ahead.

All right, moving on here. By 2014, Cicada had released the Libra Primus. And just before that, there were several songs that were included in a bespoke OS that they made. I was going to play the song for you, but um audio, that's my fault there, but it's a bit psychedelic. And the point that I was going to make as we listened to the song was that music is an incredibly effective means to connect with somebody once again right all of these different ins to connect with an individual. Uh we have kind of uh there's a phenomenon within the community that if you're kind of falling out of the solving zeal listen to one of the songs

they released and you feel empowered to go in and solve again. number of times that's even happened to me. And even the cover itself, this is where we start to get into some trouble. A lot of people looked at this and said, "Oh, that's Masonic, right? We have the overlapping compasses." We have no proof of that. People will make the claim, "Hey, they're 33 degrees of masonry. 3301. Look, I can prove it. There's a there's the thing on the cover. It's proof that they are indeed Masonic. I don't know. But now is when we start to see that the conspiratorial narrative cicada starts to really pick up steam. Uh we also this was just more evidence

of just how directly cicada is having somebody question. We even say you will find an end to your innocence, your illusions, your certainty and your reality. Okay, that's actually kind of culty. That's how you know it's a little strange, right? The idea that you program your mind, program your reality. Okay. And [snorts] even moving on, you know, am I a pilgrim now? Why are they referring to me, you know, solvers with religious language? We shape ourselves and our realities. Um, this line right here, you are a law unto yourself is pulled from Crowley. Each intelligence is holy is pulled from Blake that kind of really making the point here. There's a heavily spiritual stuff. Now, partially the reason that it was

able to gain such prominence on the world stage was because of these esoteric elements. They're a mysterious organization. >> [snorts] >> and that frankly it was fun to solve. I'm sure people here were solving CTFs today or puzzles. It feels good to solve. And then you have your mystery. Humans psychologically, we love information gaps and we love to fill those gaps. Who is behind cicada? Is it the government? Is it a group of activists? Is it disenfranchised people? Who the hell's behind cicada? Right? Who? And we feel that with our own narratives. What's striking about cicada, of course, we have simple ubiquitous imagery that the story is created both by cicada and by the person who's interacting with

the puzzle. That's crucial. The story that we tell ourselves, of course. And then there's the flow, that dopamine rush that you get from solving. All of these things came together to form the perfect storm for this thing that would rise into the zeitgeist. And you know, fair fairly enough, you know, of all the unsolved puzzles today, there are kind of three big great ones out there. We have the K4 cryptos, we have the Zodiac ciphers, and we have Libra Primus. Uh, Libra Primus, as I said earlier, that's 58 pages encrypted in runes, and we still don't know what it means. We have another information gap. So, anybody could come along and say, "I solved it. It says XYZ."

Filling it in with their own narrative. [sighs] This is one of my favorite parts. You guys see that baby baby mask? Yeah. um that apparently is cicada is represented in the dark web cicada through301 movie. Uh it's uh very strange how it's treated in the movie. And of course, you know, it's a B movie, maybe even a C movie. But it's funny that they distill the qualities of Cicada down into an eyes wide shut leading organization that, you know, character is like a secret agent that's working to solve the puzzle and get into the eyes wide shut party. For some reason, there are tons of YouTube videos, Instagram reels, Reddit stories, Twitter threads about Cicada, about conspiratorializing

it, guessing what it was, what its purpose was, and things like that. And we see this quite often, especially back in the early day when the leaked email wasn't in public consciousness as much. Um, I go through news articles regularly. I go through these things regularly just to see I nine out of 10en times there's a piece of misinformation in there where they get the dates wrong or they hypothesize who cicada is because they didn't know what the leaked email said where they're trying to guess at their motives even though that was in the leaked email. Still happens now. I don't know if you guys heard about this, but in 2024, there was a ransomware called Cicada

3301. I really like this line. I saw this today. Is your organization safe from Cicada 3301 attacks? I don't know. Just being in the community, I'm just sharing that with my community. It made me laugh a lot. But why why would this ransomware group of all the different things that they could choose from, why do they choose Cicada? I can't get in their heads and I can't give you a precise answer. What I can tell you is that cicada is prominent that it has kind of a power behind it that you know it's legitimizing. If you're this group that is meaning to do ill, why not say that you are aligned with a powerful group quote unquote

powerful group? Now [sighs] after this cicada was used essentially by people who have political aims as well. And this first happened as early as 2015 when an attacker uh claiming to be cicada301 targeted a Planned Parenthood I think it was in Missouri, don't quote me on that, Mississippi. and leaked uh the names of people who were going to the Planned Parenthood employee IDs. It was, you know, they [snorts] did a lot of damage. And you can bet it was politically motivated. They did not like Planned Parenthood. And this was really the first time that we would see politically motivated actors abuse the materials of the puzzle. Whether that's their symbol, whether that's the kind of spirituality that's

under the general umbrella of cicada. And we also see once again the first time, beware of false paths, always verify PGP. We're going to take a little stop and talk about fascism. everything that I've talked about so far where we're, you know, tools of an ARG to have somebody connect with the real world, question their place in it. It turns out that there are other people who think that that is also an effective means of getting people on your side. In the 1930s, there was something called the I am movement, which was an America first movement, which co-opted the rising transcendentalism. and you know tried to make it clear to white folks, hey you know you're divine,

right? We can prove it with with spirituality. Your whiteness is divine. Come join the I am movement. Below that I have a quote [snorts] from a fascist philosopher who Hitler really liked and I people say maybe you know be careful quoting a fascist philosopher but I'd still like to share it. The goal of the creative imagination is to break down the barriers between language and world as well as the subject and object. [sighs] In [snorts] starting in about 2020, individuals associated with QAnon or just the whole kind of group really took a liking to the puzzle within the community. We've heard even tell that cicada 301 might have actually kind of set the blueprint. Um there are many articles about this

out there even one that's on vice that it is actually pretty good but it talks about the gamification of QAnon. This is not a necess this my talk isn't this is not novel but you can bet that QAnon was using some of the same techniques where there is a great big puzzle going on. We're going to give you little blurbs about what the answers might be. go on find them in the real world. It's very dangerous [sighs] in a and so there's this kind of idea that potentially when Q and I was co-opting our imagery the question that I'm asking I'm not saying this is the truth but is did were we on the receiving end of a

new old page from the alt-right playbook? This cons this looks like the Pepe Sylvia map, but I assure you it's not. This is the result of a study by Michigan State University. I believe in 2023. I maybe got the date wrong. What this chart shows is the relationship between Twitter accounts that were cross-osting information were friended, you know, friends with one another and generally posting QAnon stuff, election disinformation, COVID disinformation, and a whole host of other things. Let me tell you, as someone who runs a community, it was really frightening when I saw Cicada through 301 on the same the same thing as neo-Nazis. Freaked me out. But it turns out that those with the most engagement and the

most followers on Twitter were those who were abusing the imagery of Cicada through301. It worked. They really were able to spread their narrative through our imagery. And that's just the data that shows that. I can tell you that from a community experience standpoint, we have been we've been getting people are threatened with doxing quite often. People will try to dox me every every so often because I talk about these things just because I'm saying talking about a bug puzzle. We have had many community members leave because they felt threatened by threat actors who were, you know, saying, you know, we're the real cicada. We're going to, you know, put you out of, you know, we're going to make your community go

away. So on and so forth. Um, and this is something luckily that doesn't happen as much now. During the 2020 election leading up, [snorts] it was pretty intense. Um when we were in an IRC, this is even before QAnon, there were hundreds of people who were coming in every day and were claiming to be Cicada or that they were, you know, that they were certain that this had something to do with QAnon and they wanted to dig into it. Uh this is also when we started to see the rise of fake puzzles as I said earlier, right? I'm going to go on the notion PGP is broken. Listen to me. Use my fake puzzle. Hey, and it's

interesting, right? The way the way I'm going to term this is that Cicada 3301 made itself to be an a trench in the zeitgeist. It entrenched itself in society and other people came along and they laid a pipeline in that trench. And that is exactly what the fake puzzles were trying to do. We're trying to be a pipeline to other communities that were not so nice. And [sighs and snorts] it's funny, um, we found that, you know, in our community, we're just a bunch of nerds trying to solve a puzzle. I've had people tell me that in, um, communities that are less reputable that people feel afraid that they start talking about gangstalking and, you know, they're getting really

paranoid. And it's really insidious stuff because when you're starting to connect with someone's spirituality and their sense of being and even magical thinking that's attracting a lot of people who have um might have some mental health challenges, right? Even with me, right, a lot of solvers will find the puzzle when they're in a vulnerable place that even as a community organizer, it's important for us to frame a community in a way that is welcoming to those folks and it's able to orient them in the right direction where, you know, fake puzzles want to take advantage of that and use that vulnerability to their gain. Um, in this article that was published by Michigan State, uh, they make the

claim that this was, um, even though we have all these accounts, it was a very small group of people who were engaged in a kind of digital astrourfing. Uh, this was something I had to look up, look into. And it's frightening to see what a small group of people can do to make a problem look far bigger than it really is. Um, let me show you guys some some stuff. This is uh actually pulled directly from something that was posted on our wiki a few years ago. There you go. That was somebody who was posting a ton of QAnon stuff. And look what's in their banner. It's the cicada. Oh boy. This one kind of freaks me out a little

bit. This is a uh I don't even know what you would I think it's called the Q map. And we can see right there at the bottom is Cicada 3301 that somehow even in the modern conversation around QAnon Cicada is still involved. This is uh a list of secret societies I found prior to our talk. Where is our cicada? [snorts] Ah, right there. That cicada has made itself out to be a mysterious organization. That that's all they are, but somehow they've been elevated to that of a secret society. Guys, I've been in this stuff for six years. I could promise you they're not. These are just nerds that really want to impassion other nerds to

care about the same things that they care about. That's it. So to kind of sum some stuff up, what made Cicada vulnerable was the fact that we have so much information. I could have spent this entire talk just talking about the art and literature. another 50 minutes just talking about the stuff that we've done with Libra Primus, just talking about the puzzle steps between 2012 and 2013. I could talk about so many little itty bitty facets that in Cicada solvers, we have an infoch environment. It's actually part of the reason why it's not solved is because we have so many data points and so many pieces of information and it's really hard to keep track of it all. Luckily,

thanks to the careful work of archivists, shout out to the Wiki Witch of the West. Thank you so much for organizing a wiki, that we are able to consolidate this information and then even if it's still a little scattered, we're at least able to put it all in one place where somebody might actually be able to understand it. There is a pretty large lack of public clarity um both in solving efforts and who is behind Cicada. The number of times I've seen the leaked email mentioned in a YouTube video or an article might be five [snorts] or six times. Very few people actually do the digging to get to that point of finding that and instead

fill it in with their own nonsense. It's the CIA, man. It's the UK government, man. It's hackers. And as I said, the strong presence in the zeitgeist, it was a readymade trench to bury the pipeline. And if there is nothing else that is pulled from this talk, it is be aware of the readymade trenches in society. If you are a puzzle creator and you are thinking about making a really compelling puzzle, be cautious because [snorts] sometimes you can make a puzzle that is so good that somebody will want to co-opt it. And also if you want to make a really good puzzle, you know, throw in a little spirituality. Those esoteric and metaphysical themes are the most important pieces. As I

said, pulling back to the fascist philosopher whom Hitler really enjoyed, who believed that the best way to get people engaged with the alt-right was to break down their sense of reality. ARGs do a really good job at breaking down your sense of reality, especially if if you're pulled in through the esoteric. [snorts] Um, I have sped through this a little faster than I have intended to. This is my first time speaking at something like these. But um one of the things that you can do to prevent people from having the wrong impression is turn your rabbit hole into a wonderland. You know, I I'll say it. I like UFO stuff. I like Bigfoot stuff. I can't

help it. It's junk food for the brain. But it's an infinite rabbit hole. You go nowhere. With cicada, you don't. There's your initial ingress into the puzzle. Maybe that was because you're interested by the cryptographic stuff. Maybe that's because you, you know, were interested by the privacy aspect or the spiritual aspect, whatever that might have been, they're all these little ingress points, these little rabbit holes. But if you can build out a wonderland and show people that no, no, there's defined boundaries. There is art, literature, there is the cryptography, there is libra primus, there is our archive and there is the central thing that we are trying to do break liber libra primus. You create those bounds

that if you are running a community that you think might be at risk of being used by a disinformation actor, create a space that is definable and that you can control essentially. And I say control more so meaning that you are able to have agency on how that community is built and run. This uh was put together by one of our wonderful one of my wonderful friends and cicada solvers by the name of CMBB. He's done a lot of work in consolidating our information. And part of the wonderland analogy is to also illustrate [snorts] one of the ways you can't always you can't blanket prevent people from spreading crap. You can't. Every day we have people coming

in finding a fake puzzle. The same thing that happened to me happens to many other people on a monthly basis. But what you can do is be the last link in the chain. We are the most prominent community that's associated with Cicada. That if somebody gets interested in something, finds a piece of [ __ ] and pulls it and wants to talk about it with other people, they can bring it back to us. And it's about directing them in the right way. Where is it? Here. I'm an educator. I, as I said, I work for uh Maryland public schools. And there are a few skills in my trade. Patience, veracity, and tenacity. You have to be patient. Understand the

timeline that's going on, especially with handling misinformation. When do you want to have X, Y, and Z done? With kids, patience is the room that we give people to grow. People make mistakes. It's human. Shaming somebody for getting something wrong is how you drive them away. So part of what you can do to prevent the spread of disinformation or just misinformation, be try to be kind. And it's exhausting. Really is. It can be absolutely exhausting. But that's where you got to have the tenacity to keep going. You got to have the tenacity to wake up every day and go, "Yep, I'm going to spend some time looking around, trolling the internet, and seeing if I can find

people who are, you know, spreading a little bit of misinformation, even if that's unknowingly." And that also means that you got to have veracity. It's saying and seeing and saying hard truths that you know, it's tough when a kid comes up to you and goes, "Mr. bird. I found a diamond. Is it a diamond? Is it? But it's a piece of quartz. And you know there, you know, it's neither here nor there nor there. But usually, you know, hey, that's quartz. But it's okay that it's not a diamond because it's really cool when you tell them all these facts about quartz and this that and the other thing. Yeah, probably the kid would have had a better time if I told them it was

a diamond. And for my really little ones, you bet. You know, if you're a prek or something, I'm gonna tell you it's a diamond. For our older kids, I'm telling them what it is. I don't want them to be under any illusion that it's something that it's not. And you have to do the same thing in solvers as my friend did to me. Sorry, bud. It's [ __ ] Um, I have run under my time. That's all right. Um, but I will be uh hanging out outside for anybody who would like to ask me any questions. any if you guys have ever heard of roses, buds or thorns, you're happy to hit me with those as well. Uh thank you all for

coming to my first uh attempt at giving a talk. I really appreciate all of you in this room. Uh and uh have a great rest of your bides. Cheers. [applause]

AI cannot perform cryp analysis. AI cannot perform crypt analysis. We cannot use AI dissolve in our case. We just can't. And in fact it's a current struggle that we have the community where people come in actually why didn't I include this in the talk AI kind of gives a sense of misinformation where they it tells people hey this is the right answer with complete certainty and then they come in and present that as fact and so we as a community now it's fighting AI misinformation really great question yeah so we don't like it there is the thought that we could potentially see I get this uh model. So like the idea that you have an AI that can use a really great tool,

a cryp analysis tool and maybe point out patterns that we haven't noticed or helped us

>> thing is as I said it's not there yet. Part of the problem The puzzle is so big. It's 58 pages encrypted in runes with the matri on top of that. Every rune in the Libra Primus has an associated value with it. Um, this is a weird fun fact that thing I showed you final.jpeg. Uh, if you were to take like the sum of all of those words or every letter that they use as like every English letter has associated prime value and you can make these phrases that are prime. Uh, but not JPEG. the sum of 9,221 and that is what's called prime and emerg. So it's prime forwards and backwards. The sum 1,229

appears in the libra primus in the solve pages. So we have these weird relationships between something to do with the gamatria. Some like hey I can tell you how to use AI to figure that stuff out. >> Okay, >> huh. Talk next year. >> Talk for next year. Why AI solving makes me angry. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.

>> To be frank, that's not something I actually know a lot about. Um I think that partially the reason that chose might have actually been based on his work was assigning quote unquote an order in value um to like his numbers. I'm not sure but I'll be honest about those things and it's also probably why they like really genuinely very briefly usage gets really pumped up in the mainream. But yeah, sorry. I will tell you the fact that they have elder rules is kind of strange because those were used by Nazis.

I'm Jewish. I don't want to walk around my

I will say funny is Jewish origin. They have this bizarre justosition of we have runes which have historically you know had a context against something that is directly Jewish which leads me to believe they probably don't have >> Oh yeah yeah 100%. But that's a really interesting question. I want to learn more about that. All right. Uh, questions, comments, snide remarks. Thank you for coming everybody. I appreciate you immensely.