The checksum calendar

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)

Javanese charters date themselves with what looks like absurd redundancy — a single day fixed by tithi, several concurrent week-cycles, the lunar mansion, and more, where one system would do. Join this to information theory: redundancy is exactly what error-detecting codes are made of. The conjecture is that the overdetermined date evolved as a checksum for a document culture that expected every important text to be recopied on perishable media — corruption of any one element is exposed, and often correctable, by the others — and that the practice structurally implies professional calendar-keepers computing from written tables now entirely lost. The mechanism is self-interest: a charter is a title deed, and a deed whose date can be silently corrupted is a deed that can be contested. If it holds, a baroque ritual habit is revealed as engineering, and Java's lost computational literature is demonstrated by nothing more than arithmetic on surviving dates.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Astronomically verifiable date-strings in original Javanese charters will be fully internally consistent in at least 90% of cases, while dates transmitted through later copies will show a significantly higher fault rate, and among faulty copied dates single-element errors will outnumber multi-element errors by at least 4:1 — the signature of independent-element (checksum-style) corruption. Primary clause: the original-versus-copy consistency gap together with single-element dominance; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The DHARMA project editions (machine-readable Sanskrit/vernacular inscriptions of South & Southeast Asia): astronomical verification of the calendrical elements across originals and copies in the Javanese charter corpus.

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 by a fresh instance working only from the inline prompt, with no file reads, web access, or database queries.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Close prior: Eade & Gislen (and Damais before them) astronomically verified and corrected the overdetermined date-strings of early Javanese inscriptions, which anticipates the redundancy-as-verifiability mechanism; but the checksum operationalization — original-versus-copy fault-rate gap and 4:1 single-element error dominance — has not been run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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