Greenland lead deposition from Roman smelting is a proxy for silver output; predict lead flux co-moves with denarius fineness and leads Egyptian papyri price inflation by roughly a decade. Falsify: ice-core lead vs papyrological price series.
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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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 1–7 of 7 matching conjectures.
Hoard deposition is antiquity's VIX: deposition rates should lead invasions in narrative sources by months (people bury on rumor), and non-recovery rates should scale with conflict mortality. Falsify: dated hoard databases vs chronicle chronology.
Debasement is tolerated until a critical fineness, then old-coin hoarding jumps discontinuously — and the threshold should be roughly the same in 3rd-century Rome and 14th-century France. Falsify: old/new coin ratios in hoards vs fineness series.
Coin wear per year (calibrated on dated issues) measures circulation velocity; predict velocity spikes in crises as hoards dishoard. Falsify: 3D wear metrology on stratified site finds.
Roman brickyard outputs (CIL XV stamps) should show Pareto-distributed firm sizes and growth independent of size — modern firm dynamics in the ancient economy. Falsify: stamp counts per figlina over time.
Provenance distance-decay exponents should scale with value density: Mayen lava millstones should decay steeper than fine pottery by precisely the ratio of transport cost to unit value. Falsify: sourced distribution maps.
Price-ceiling economics meets Roman epigraphy: Diocletian's Price Edict of 301 CE worked exactly as shortage theory predicts — goods capped below prevailing market prices withdrew from recorded exchange, while goods capped at or above market stayed visible, so the Edict's failure is…