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The Paired Khipu Census
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)
Archives that keep duplicate copies accidentally build a population estimator into their own holdings: if khipu accounts were made in matching sets — one cord record retained locally, a counterpart carried up the administrative line, a practice consistent with matching-number khipus reported from excavated contexts — then the rate at which today's surviving sample happens to contain both members of a pair estimates the surviving fraction of the entire original population, by the same logic as mark-recapture. The Open Khipu Repository is that surviving sample, catalogued cord by cord. The mechanism is bureaucratic: an accounting empire audits, auditing requires copies, and copies scattered to different fates let the wreckage measure its own completeness. If the conjecture holds, the total number of khipus the Andean administrative world once held — currently pure guesswork — becomes computable from knot data alone, and the answer should be enormous.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Screen all catalogued khipus for near-duplicate pairs, defined as khipus sharing an ordered run of encoded numerical values long enough to be vanishingly improbable by chance. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the implied survival fraction from the pair-recovery rate is below 1 percent, i.e., an original population above roughly sixty thousand khipus given the several hundred catalogued. Categorical fallback clause, decisive only if pairs are too few for stable estimation: at least 3 near-duplicate pairs exist between khipus with distinct collection histories.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Open Khipu Repository (OKR): the full cord-and-knot numerical records support the duplicate-pair screen and the derived survival-fraction estimate.
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.
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated in a single blind Write by claude-fable-5 with no reads, greps, web access, database queries, or any other tool calls; all content produced from model-internal knowledge under the W18 hard blankness protocol.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Matching/duplicate khipus and the Inka 'checks-and-balances' multi-keeper practice are documented (Urton, 'Khipu Archives: Duplicate Accounts'; Puruchuco set; 'A Numerical Connection Between Two Khipus' 2024), but using the pair-recovery rate as a mark-recapture estimator of the total original khipu population is un-run. Small khipu-studies field.
- Urton, 'Khipu Archives: Duplicate Accounts and Identity Labels in the Inka Knotted-String Records', Latin American Antiquity
- 'A Numerical Connection Between Two Khipus', Ñawpa Pacha 2024
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