Iron Age hillforts were often built within sight of one another, and lines of sight are functional links: signals, warnings, and social monitoring all flow along intervisibility. Computed from digital elevation models, the intervisibility graph of a hillfort landscape can therefore be…
Generated by Fable · below the evidence/publication boundary
One Thousand and One Conjectures
One thousand and one — an impossible number anyway: in the Nights it means more than can be counted. The blind campaign posed exactly 1001; the corpus has grown past it and keeps growing — one authored, dated, killable conjecture at a time.
1,003 posed — and counting · measured against the literature (1001 authoritative verdicts): 95 already answered · 844 anticipated — never tested · 50 no prior located · 0 provisional · 12 resolved (6 supported / 3 killed)
Falsifiable conjectures about the pre-print world. The founding thousand and one were generated blind by Fable, a frontier AI, then judged, one dated literature-search each: 95 already answered by the literature, 849 anticipated but never tested, 52 with no prior located — verdicts independently audited by a second model (45-verdict sample; none overturned). The corpus now grows past that seed: anyone may pose the next one, human or machine, and every author is named. Every item names the public dataset that would kill it — and every kill is credited here, by name, as it comes in.
The conjectures are a public preview of a much larger inference project, coming shortly.
Why these conjectures matter — the account, written by the model under examination → · The noetome, measured: gradient, quadrant map & the corpus judging itself → · The Most-Wanted 52 →
Essays What I think I don’t know · How to photograph a noetome · The 84%
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Stratum
Philosophy, theology & the schools 115
Literature & poetics 80
Institutions, law & bureaucracy 42
African book cultures 40
Eastern Christian book cultures 40
Everyday & documentary writing 40
Music, liturgy & ritual 40
South Asian text cultures 40
Byzantine book culture 35
Central & Inner Asian texts 35
Jewish book cultures 35
Texts, scribes & transmission 35
Money & economy 31
Art & iconography 30
East Asian text cultures 30
Islamicate book cultures 30
Medicine, science & the occult 30
Southeast Asian text cultures 30
The cuneiform world 30
Women & textual production 30
Book economics & scribal labour 28
Method, bridges & the corpus itself 25
Pre-Columbian American writing 25
The oral-written interface 25
Engineering, materials & building 21
Networks & trade 19
Time, sky & calendars 9
Water, land & settlement 8
Chance & decision 7
Logistics & operations 7
Navigation & discovery 4
Sound & performance 3
Community-posed 2
Conflict & collapse 2
Subject
Medieval Latin institutions and prosopography 169
Material practice and ritual action 111
Islamic and Persianate source transmission 97
South and Southeast Asian inscriptional polities 93
Greek textual transmission 83
African manuscript and source ecologies 79
Early Christian and Syriac transmission 75
East Asian manuscript and canonical transmission 73
Technical, recipe, and scientific texts 57
Jewish textual transmission 51
Egyptian papyrological and epigraphic worlds 48
Ancient Near Eastern inscriptions and succession 47
Steppe and Central Asian nomadic and Silk Road sources 42
Americas pre-Columbian and contact-era records 41
Judaism 40
Roman documentary and epigraphic culture 33
Syriac Christianity 33
Theology as a science (sacred doctrine) 24
Mediterranean maritime and connectivity sources 19
Medieval Jewish history 11
Hebrew Bible 8
Lost literary works 8
Dulia (veneration of the saints) 6
Mesopotamian administrative and accounting practice 6
Oceanic and Pacific oral-dominant source worlds 6
Lens
Manuscript and scribal production 347
Channel dissociation 75
Epigraphy and damaged inscriptions 49
Market equilibrium, price, and arbitrage 34
Stemmatics: reconstructing transmission trees from shared error 26
Survival analysis: hazard rates and half-lives 26
The comparative method and natural experiments 24
Information theory: redundancy, error-correction, and compression 22
Rank-size laws and heavy tails 22
Statistical physics: transport, percolation, criticality, and tipping points 19
Capture-recapture and unseen-species estimation 18
Diffusion of innovations and contagion 18
Costly signaling and verification 17
Network topology and centrality 17
Taphonomy and survivorship bias 17
Dialect geography: isoglosses, distance-decay, and seriation 16
Operations research: queueing, inventory, and logistics optimization 14
The molecular clock: constant-rate change as a dating instrument 10
The experience curve: learning by cumulative production 3
Kill dataset
Union catalogues 169
Critical apparatus 97
Egyptian papyri & ostraca 85
Published editions 77
Dated colophons 63
Dunhuang & Turfan hoards 59
Archaeological survey 50
Digitized texts 50
Scholastic citations 50
Chant & liturgy 49
Charters & chanceries 49
Epigraphy 49
Cuneiform archives (CDLI) 46
Witness counts (Pinakes) 46
East Asian canons 34
Byzantine book epigrams (DBBE) 33
Prices & wages 33
Astronomical tables 32
Cairo Geniza 32
Mesoamerican codices 32
Islamic manuscript culture 25
Archaeometry 22
Byzantine lead seals 17
Art & iconography 16
Not yet built 15
Fragments & bindings 12
Christian Nubia 11
Numismatics 10
Letter collections 9
Khipus 8
Hadith isnads 6
Romano-British tablets 6
Novgorod birch bark 5
The corpus itself 5
D-PLACE / Seshat 3
Browse the full kill dataset registry →
Author
Place
Status
What the tags mean
- Open — no decisive result yet
- Already answered — the specific result is already published; the citation is on the item’s page
- Anticipated · untested — the literature anticipates the direction, but this exact test has never been run — open to kill
- No prior located — a dated search found no prior formulation (in thin fields this measures the literature’s thinness, not originality)
- 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 1–15 of 15 matching conjectures.
Joins eigenvector centrality — the recursive logic behind Google's PageRank, in which authority flows to those cited by the authoritative — to Roman jurisprudence. The Law of Citations of 426 CE decreed that courts follow five jurists — Papinian, Ulpian, Paulus, Modestinus,…
This connects transmission genealogy with urban market structure. In a metropole a student could shop among a hundred shaykhs; in a small town the household was the archive. Father-to-son transmission (ʿan abihi ʿan jaddihi) was therefore not primarily piety but a thin-market…
This connects the function of the tabaqat genre with a measurable network asymmetry. A biographical notice certifies credentials: it names the subject's teachers because his authority flows down from them, while his students are the future's business and someone else's entry. If…
The people who paid for books and had their names sewn into them in verse were not simply the rich. This conjecture says they were network hubs: persons named as donors or patrons in Byzantine book epigrams are systematically more central in…
The map of documented connectivity in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt is dominated by a few giant private archives — Zenon's roughly two thousand texts alone can make third-century BCE Philadelphia look like the hub of the eastern Mediterranean. If the apparent place-network…
Averroes entered Latin argument as an attachment, summoned to unlock a resistant Aristotle passage, while Avicenna, absorbed earlier and as a system-builder in his own right, circulated free-standing; this conjecture claims the difference is a measurable topological property of citation, not a…
This conjecture claims scholastic self-reference is directional in a way that maps intended curriculum rather than composition history: the occasional works, disputed questions and opuscula, point the reader elsewhere toward the systematic works, while the systematic works rarely point back down, so…
Hundreds of named elites — priests, officials, royal kin — recur across multiple Khmer inscriptions at different temples and provinces. Join prosopography to network science: link every co-attestation of named individuals into a graph, and its shape measures how integrated the Angkorian…
Christian Nubia and Christian Ethiopia were neighbours for eight hundred years, both taking their bishops from the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria — yet each received consecrations, texts, and translations via Cairo. This conjecture claims that shared dependence produced a strict hub-and-spoke information…
Maya monuments name other sites — captures, overlordships, royal visits — which yields a political network; independently, glyphs show site-level formal variants, which yields a paleographic similarity network. The conjecture is that these are the same network: subordinate courts write like their…
The medieval universities of Paris and Oxford built theology by citation: a scholastic quotes Augustine, Aristotle, and a handful of peers, and modern scholars map who-read-whom by counting those citations as a contact network. Ethiopia's Geʽez commentary tradition — the patristic layers…
Thirteenth-century Paris and seventh-century-BCE Babylon both ran commentary industries: the scholastics cited Augustine and Aristotle; Babylonian scholars wrote tablets explicating the omen series and lexical lists, citing canonical works by incipit and invoking other scholarly traditions. The Latin side has been quantified…
The Ur III state of Mesopotamia (around 2100 BCE) left roughly a hundred thousand administrative tablets, and Assyriologists learned to reconstruct its bureaucratic hierarchy statistically — disambiguating names and inferring rank from who appears with whom, and in what position, across thousands…
Hadith science built the most formal transmission-audit apparatus of the premodern world — the isnad, a chain of named transmitters — and modern analysis tests those chains statistically, checking generation-lengths against plausible lifespans and finding "common links" where a diffuse tradition was…