AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The theater fraction
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 theater fraction. Service-capacity planning meets Greek civic demography: theaters were sized to a fixed service fraction of the citizen body — a percentile capacity rule — making seat counts a fossilized census tighter than any other urban size proxy.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across >= 30 poleis with measured theater capacity and independent population estimates, the ratio of capacity to estimated total population clusters in 0.10-0.20 with a coefficient of variation <= 0.35, tighter than the CV of population-to-walled-area scaling (>= 0.5) on the same cities; pan-Hellenic sanctuary theaters stand out as > 3-sigma outliers. Scatter as wide as other proxies kills it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Ancient Theatre Archive capacity measurements joined to population estimates in Hansen's Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis.
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/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).
Novelty / leakage triage
Leaked (already exists in the literature)
A near-direct precedent exists: a settlement-scaling study of entertainment-structure capacities across 238 Roman-Empire sites explicitly treats seating capacity as a population proxy and reads deviations as socio-economically meaningful — the conjecture's move on the same object class. The Greek-polis-only band, CV comparison, and sanctuary-outlier clauses were not located, but the connection is published.
- 'Reassessing the Capacities of Entertainment Structures in the Roman Empire' — Capacity-as-population scaling on 238 sites
- Hansen, Copenhagen Polis Centre 'Inventory' (BMCR) — The independent population data
Predictions
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