Precision dies by the ruler

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)

The precision of a copied astronomical table was set not by science but by carpentry: the ruled grid of the page. When a scribe copied a table into a grid ruled for fewer or narrower columns than his exemplar used, the final sexagesimal places were TRUNCATED — dropped, not rounded — because ruling was done before copying, often by a different hand, and the copyist fitted the numbers to the boxes he was given. The surprising connection is that this physical constraint, invisible in editions, masquerades in the literature as deliberate scholarly simplification. If this holds, apparent precision decay along table lineages tracks page layout rather than intellectual decline, and codicology becomes a required control in the history of computational accuracy.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Among DISHAS table witnesses whose images permit layout measurement, witnesses with ruled column grids narrower than their family's exemplar norm will show terminal-digit loss bearing the statistical signature of truncation rather than rounding (surviving final-digit distribution unbiased rather than rounded-symmetric) in at least 70% of affected columns. Primary clause: the truncation-versus-rounding signature at the 70% level; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

DISHAS witness transcriptions paired with manuscript images, treating the physical table as a ruled object (non-codex evidence class).

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

Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use of any kind; the packet was generated entirely from the model's own knowledge and emitted as a single text message.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Table-editing scholarship treats precision changes, rounding conventions, and truncation as known transmission variables (van Dalen's criteria; discussions of precision maintenance in copying), but the codicological causal claim — ruled-grid width forcing truncation, distinguishable from rounding by terminal-digit statistics and misread as scholarly simplification — is unproposed and un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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