GPT-6 Astra finally cracked a 217-year-old Napoleon-era military secret
Forget your boring spreadsheets. Carter Church just used GPT-6 Astra to decode a French military letter that sat unread for over two centuries. It’s almost impressive how quickly AI can turn historical mystery into mundane logistics.
The letter, addressed to Auguste de Marmont, spent 217 years mocking historians who couldn't decipher its complex mix of letters, numbers, and symbols. Carter Church fed a low-res 1969 scan into GPT-6 Astra, and within six hours, the machine had mapped out 1,300 cryptographic units. While humans previously managed to guess only a third of the text, the AI identified that 29 of the symbols weren't just letters, but entire words.
The content isn't exactly a lost Shakespearean sonnet—it's a military briefing from March 1809 detailing troop placements before the war with Austria. It maps out the movements of Duke of Danzig, Prince Poniatowski, and others, effectively turning the mystery into a glorified logistics report. The accuracy was confirmed by cross-referencing it with an existing, non-coded order from Napoleon Bonaparte himself, proving the AI didn't just hallucinate a history lesson.
It is genuinely amusing that after two centuries of human frustration, the deep secrets of the Napoleonic Wars were solved by a language model that probably also knows how to write a poem about a toaster. History is now officially at the mercy of whoever has the most GPU credits.
Source: Carter Church
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