AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The painter sees three figures ahead
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The painter sees three figures ahead. Mixtec screenfold painters worked along red guide-lined boustrophedon registers laid out before painting. If composition ran on a short planning horizon, spacing should compress as the painter approaches each register turn — the same crowding-at-the-end signature papyrologists read in line justification — making the planning horizon, counted in figure-slots, a measurable constant of a hand or workshop rather than an imponderable of style.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it): in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1, inter-figure spacing in the final quarter of each register run is at least 15 percent tighter than in the middle two quarters, in at least 70 percent of registers. Secondary clause: the onset of compression, in figure-slots before the turn, is constant within a codex to plus or minus one slot but differs between the two codices — the horizon is a workshop parameter.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the British Museum's digitized Codex Zouche-Nuttall (Am1902,0308.1) and the online facsimiles of the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1 via FAMSI and the Austrian National Library.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 278-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w05_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W05 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. A platform output-limit resume occurred before the single Write; no additional tool calls or information ingress occurred.
Novelty / leakage triage
no prior located yet (provisional)
A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it.
[Independent blind re-audit 2026-07-08 (2nd pass, generator-independent), confidence low. Double-confirmed: both the provisional pass and this re-audit located no prior formulation of the specific operationalized claim. NOTE: low-confidence negative — an exhaustive search of specialist print scholarship was not achievable, so 'no prior located' is weaker here.] Two adjacent literatures exist: papyrologists document line-end 'crowding'/compression in justification, and Mixtec screenfold layout (red guide-lined boustrophedon registers) is studied (Boone; Jansen & Perez Jimenez). But I located no work importing the crowding signature into Mesoamerican codices to test the specific claim: that inter-figure spacing in the final quarter of each register run is >=15% tighter than the middle two quarters in >=70% of registers (Zouche-Nuttall, Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1), and that the compression onset (in figure-slots before the turn) is a constant of a hand/workshop (+/-1 slot) differing between codices — a measurable 'planning horizon'. The layout is described; spacing-compression-before-turns as a workshop parameter is the unlocated operationalization. Confidence low for art-history search-exhaustiveness.
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