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The qibla learning curve
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 qibla learning curve. Joins experience-curve economics (power-law quality improvement with cumulative output) to Islamic mathematical geography: mosque orientation error is a measurable output-quality series spanning eight centuries, and it should fall as a power law in cumulative regional mosque construction as zij tables and qibla methods diffused; sacred accuracy as a learning curve.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For dated mosques with published measured orientations in two independent regions (the Swahili coast; al-Andalus and the Maghrib), the median absolute deviation from the true great-circle qibla falls from >=15 degrees before 1000 CE to <=6 degrees after 1400; error versus cumulative regional dated-mosque count fits a power law with learning exponent 0.2-0.5; and improvements arrive as regional step changes following documented arrivals of astronomical tables and qibla instruments, rather than as a uniform secular drift.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: published archaeoastronomical orientation surveys of dated mosques (East African coast; Iberian and Maghribi corpora). No error decline over time, or errors behaving as an undirected random walk, kills it.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
Leaked (already exists in the literature)
The connection is established historiography with a quantitative regional precedent: David King's foundational work documents mosque misalignment and the diffusion of increasingly accurate mathematical qibla methods from the 9th century (the conjecture names him), an Anatolian study already performs a regional multi-century measured-orientation-error analysis (1150-1590), and an early-period accuracy study covers 622-900 CE. The experience-curve formalization (power-law exponent vs cumulative regional output) and the two named regions were not located, but error-declining-with-method-diffusion is the standing account.
- King, 'Astronomy in the Service of Islam' + 'The Earliest Islamic Mathematical Methods and Tables for Finding the Direction of Mecca' — The named foundation
- 'Historical mosque orientation in Turkey: Central-Western Anatolia, 1150-1590', JAS — Regional quantitative error-over-time precedent
Predictions
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