The canon rounds to auspicious numbers

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Sanskrit works advertise their sizes — the śataka's hundred verses, the sahasra's thousand, the seven hundred of famous saptaśatīs — because a round or auspicious count was itself a literary form and a marketing claim. If the form mattered, the length distribution of the whole corpus should be quantized: excess probability mass at 100, 108, 700, and 1000 and their immediate neighbourhoods, against the smooth distribution that content alone would produce. Quantization has a second-order consequence: transmitters would pad or trim toward the advertised number, so round-length works should be magnets for interpolation. If it holds, a verse count sitting exactly on a round number is itself weak evidence of textual massage, usable as a prior in editing.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In the SARIT corpus, the histogram of verse counts of complete metrical works will show statistically significant excess mass — at least threefold over a smoothed local baseline — in windows centred on 100 and 108 combined, with secondary peaks at 700 and 1000. Primary clause: the threefold excess at 100/108; the secondary peaks are secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Verse-count census across complete works in the SARIT e-text corpus, with completeness checked against NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue records.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated blind in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Round/auspicious verse-counts as a literary form (śataka 100, 108, saptaśatī 700, sahasra 1000) are well known, but the corpus-wide test — quantized excess probability mass in verse-count histograms plus round-length works as interpolation magnets — is un-run. Thin field.

'Numbers and numerals of Indian…' (INSA) — auspicious 108/1008 in tradition
'Subhashita' (Wikipedia) — śataka/saptaśatī titled by verse count

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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