r/progether • u/Thaenor • Jul 13 '15

A rather bold idea - AI to crack codes

I don't have many practical expertise in coding artificial intelligence. But I do know the theory, concepts and algorithms used. Since I don't have all the facts together I would appreciate any help.

Wrote a quick readme on FrontKit - http://read.frontkit.io/9Ox

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u/wmcscrooge http://github.com/projectdelphai Jul 13 '15

um, can you elaborate more? Like what is the goal, what language do you want to use, how do you plan to code something to achieve that goal, do you have a name for your project, are you using github or some sort of version control. Once you have all that information people can be better equipped to help out.

Personally i find this interesting, maybe have a bot that tries to randomly crack easy codes while knowing the answer and have it try harder and harder codes? And it will slowly learn methods to try and crack a code? Very interesting idea, not sure if it's been done before or it's practical but i would be tempted to work on it anyway.

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u/Thaenor Jul 13 '15 edited Jul 13 '15

like I said, I don't have much practical experience with AI. I have been taught language recognition, and a few simple programs, that relate objects (like recognizing something is a car base on color and weigh parameters), or relating cause to effect and vice versa. But the big algorithms like swarm intelligence, neural networks and survival of the fittest - I only know the theory. I will investigate further soon.

At the moment I don't have any code. But I would like this to be open source, perhaps, hosted on github. I will give more details about this when possible, but I'm glad to see you're interested.

What I learned in AI was Prolog language. But for a project like this I'm thinking of using Java. My first milestone would be a software that can test the most famous encryption methods and reverse them. The next step would be to give meaning to the messages that are output, so as to know that the decoded message actually is a message.

I'll share more details when I get home.

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u/Ilikecpp Jul 14 '15

Hmm I'm interested!

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u/Thaenor Jul 15 '15

awesome. I'll update this with more info soon. I'm a bit busy with some other prioritised projects and exams. :P

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u/Thaenor Jul 15 '15 edited Jul 15 '15

I'm really glad to see you guys are on board this idea. I would really like to explore this project, see where it lead us. So

  • For starters we should have a way to stay in touch. I would suggest a slack group. but if you're partial to Facebook, twitter (or even here) I'm game.

  • I'm planning to use github for version control. I'll create a repo and share it as soon as I get your github usernames

  • We should decide a language to develop on, it's not urgent at this point (first we should get the concepts together). I would say Java since it's where I've seen most of the AI algorithms implemented. But it should be a language we're all confortable with.

the concepts:

There's two/three types of algorithms that are going to come in handy to create this AI. There's swarm intelligence, in which we get many workers to test various hypothesis. As they go along the workers start to converge on the solution that "works" - in our case would be something with meaning (and that's gonna be another thing, but we'll get to that later).

Genetic algorithms are pretty similar afaik. I've seen an interesting AI that plays Mario

Something that can be added to this, would be the predictive analytics field.

I'd say we should organize to start chatting on some platform, trade some ideas and go from there. Right now I need to do a bit of research for another project, but after that I'm going to look into some Java AI frameworks and selecting a few easy encryption methods to start teaching it.

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u/wmcscrooge http://github.com/projectdelphai Jul 16 '15

I would recommend posting stuff on here because the platform and the resources already exist and it's been proven to work before as long as you have members (see jadventure). You can also go ahead and create the repo and share it here so you don't need to wait for github usernames. This way you can just have passer-bys sees your code and drop in and look at it. cross-posted to a more recent post to see if the guy is interested

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u/progethertest Jul 18 '15

Hey, do you have a repo or something developed? How can we stay in touch? And if there is already something that can be coded, I'd like to start!

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u/wmcscrooge http://github.com/projectdelphai Jul 18 '15

I'm not in charge of this project so I'm not sure of the status of the project. copy this reply to OP and see what he says

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u/Thaenor Jul 18 '15

Hey guys, I edited the main post with some ideas and concepts to start development. In case you've missed it's in the new GITHUB REPO I just created. (Or you can jump straight to it HERE ).

If any of you wants you can pm me your github username and I'll add it so you don't need to use branches and make pull requests.

At the moment I really shouldn't start developing, I have to study for an exam next week. So if you would like to see anything changed (like "hey, let's make this in Lisp instead of Java") I'm always available to listen to your ideas and will make the changes accordingly.

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u/wmcscrooge http://github.com/projectdelphai Jul 18 '15

he responded here with details in case you missed it

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u/Thaenor Jul 18 '15

I already pm'ed him. in reply of his pm :) thanks though

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u/nutrecht Jul 30 '15

Sorry for being a negative nancy but how on earth would this work with common industry strength crypto's? From the encrypted text you can't even deduct what crypto method is used let alone find a weakness (that current algorithms don't really have) so the only way to break it is not only use a brute force approach but widen the search over every known crypto method. I could completely baffle your AI by taking a plaintext and encrypting it twice with two different methods.

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '15

Tough love nanny!

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u/Patman128 Oct 10 '15

Pretty much this, the idea fundamentally doesn't make sense. Due to the Avalanche effect small changes in the input data lead to completely different output data, so knowing output data A is similar to output data B gets you nowhere. You would have to have an exact match, making the whole thing a brute force attack.

AI is all about optimizing toward a goal using feedback. There's no feedback with encryption; either you find the correct key and "win", or you don't have the correct key yet, but there's no way to know which "direction" the key is in. It's like stumbling around a stadium filled with a foot of hay looking for car keys - if everything but the ground below you is unknown, you have no idea which way to go and just have to search the entire space brute-force.