Chinese connoisseurship separates traced copies (mo) from freehand copies (lin) by brush quality — a judgement call. But tracing is mechanical transfer and locks absolute dimensions, while freehand copying rescales freely. Catalogue metadata alone should therefore bifurcate attested copy-pairs into a size-locked…
Generated by Fable · below the evidence/publication boundary
One Thousand and One Conjectures
308 of 1001 posed · 158 shepherd-triaged · 150 provisional · 0 frontier · 20 predictions · 9 resolved (6 supported / 3 killed) — the 1001st will be posed at Ars Inquirendi, Oxford, 20 November 2026.
Cross-domain conjectures generated noetically by Fable — a frontier AI proposing, from its own knowledge, surprising connections between two well-known domains that it judged likely to be both novel and important. Each pairs a specific claim with a quantitative prediction and a dataset that could prove it wrong; each was then checked against the literature to flag the ones with known priors.
This is one form of lead generation for Inferpedia, the encyclopedia of the missing — and this page is an early preview.
Why these conjectures matter: charting the noetome — its structure, limits & potential →
Nothing here is claimed as verified-novel. Each sits below the evidence/publication boundary: a connection already known in the literature is shown honestly and tagged Prior, and every prediction is registered before it is scored. Spotted a prior yourself? Open any conjecture and weigh in.
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Subject
Texts, scribes & transmission 95
Money & economy 31
Art & iconography 30
Literature & poetics 30
Philosophy, theology & the schools 30
Engineering, materials & building 21
Networks & trade 19
Institutions, law & bureaucracy 12
Time, sky & calendars 9
Water, land & settlement 8
Chance & decision 7
Logistics & operations 7
Navigation & discovery 4
Sound & performance 3
Conflict & collapse 2
Place
Mesopotamia 15
Egypt 20
Levant & Near East 24
Aegean & Greece 28
Rome & Italy 24
Mediterranean 12
Europe 80
Islamic world 45
Steppe & Central Asia 4
South Asia 19
East Asia 55
Southeast Asia 1
Sub-Saharan Africa 9
Americas 14
Oceania & the Pacific 6
Global / method 4
What the tags mean
- Open — no decisive result yet
- Prior — a prior formulation exists in the literature
- Supported — a registered prediction held up in data
- Falsified — a registered prediction was refuted
- testable — a quantitative prediction + kill-dataset is registered
- Shepherd-triaged — an authoritative Fable-authored verdict; shown as the pills above and the only tier in the headline numbers
- provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending — an Opus-authored first pass, not yet shepherd-confirmed and excluded from every headline figure
- awaiting prior-art check — hunt open — no triage yet; found a prior yourself? open it and weigh in
Triage state
Place & era tags are curatorial, authored by Claude (Opus 4.8).
Showing 51–55 of 55 matching conjectures.
Collector seals accumulate on Chinese paintings for centuries, and their placement is discussed as taste. The conjecture: placement obeys an interstitial packing rule — each collector takes the best remaining slot in a stable preference order, corners of the image proper first,…
Sheets and scrolls of stamped Buddhas look like space-filling repetition, but the devotional act was arithmetic: vows specified counts. If the count, not the sheet, was the unit of work, totals should cluster at canonical numbers and their multiples, and completed items…
That Japanese handscroll action tends right-to-left is a specialist commonplace; the unestablished claim is the full mechanism test across cultures. If lateral bias comes from the reading technology — the image must hand the eye onward to the next scene — then…
At Dunhuang, painted banners and woodblock prints of the same deities circulated in the same decades. Prints from one matrix are identical trivially; the conjecture is cross-matrix: variance across different woodblocks of one deity should still be far below painted variance, because…