XOR cleartext once with a key you get ciphertext. XOR the ciphertext with the same key you get the original cleartext. At its core this is the way the old DES cipher works.

A bit of useful trivia: If you XOR any number with itself, you get all zeros. You can see this in practice when an assembly programmer XOR’s a register with itself to clear it out.

This reminds me of learning a shortcut in math class but also knowing that the lesson didn’t cover that particular method. So, I use the shortcut to get the answer on a multiple choice question, but I use method from the lesson when asked to show my work. (e.g. Pascal’s Pyramid vs Binomial Expansion).

It might not seem like a shortcut for us, but something about this LLM’s training makes it easier to use heuristics. That’s actually a pretty big deal for a machine to choose fuzzy logic over algorithms when it knows that the teacher wants it to use the algorithm.