Joins the chronology of Thomas Aquinas's writing career to the arrival curve of the new Greek-Latin Aristotle: early on, Aquinas met much of Aristotle through florilegia, commentary lemmata, and older versions, quoting at second hand; as William of Moerbeke's literal translations and…
One Thousand and One Conjectures
One thousand and one — an impossible number anyway: in the Nights it means more than can be counted. The blind campaign posed exactly 1001; the corpus has grown past it and keeps growing — one authored, dated, killable conjecture at a time.
1,003 posed — and counting · measured against the literature (1001 authoritative verdicts): 95 already answered · 844 anticipated — never tested · 50 no prior located · 12 resolved (6 supported / 3 killed)
Falsifiable conjectures about the pre-print world. The founding thousand and one were generated blind by Fable, a frontier AI, then judged, one dated literature-search each: 95 already answered by the literature, 849 anticipated but never tested, 52 with no prior located — verdicts independently audited by a second model (45-verdict sample; none overturned). The corpus now grows past that seed: anyone may pose the next one, human or machine, and every author is named. Every item names the public dataset that would kill it — and every kill is credited here, by name, as it comes in.
Essays What I think I don’t know · How to photograph a noetome · The 84% · The noetome, measured → · The Most-Wanted 52 →
Why these conjectures matter: charting the noetome — its structure, limits & potential →
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Stratum
Philosophy, theology & the schools 115
Literature & poetics 80
Institutions, law & bureaucracy 42
African book cultures 40
Eastern Christian book cultures 40
Everyday & documentary writing 40
Music, liturgy & ritual 40
South Asian text cultures 40
Byzantine book culture 35
Central & Inner Asian texts 35
Jewish book cultures 35
Texts, scribes & transmission 35
Money & economy 31
Art & iconography 30
East Asian text cultures 30
Islamicate book cultures 30
Medicine, science & the occult 30
Southeast Asian text cultures 30
The cuneiform world 30
Women & textual production 30
Book economics & scribal labour 28
Method, bridges & the corpus itself 25
Pre-Columbian American writing 25
The oral-written interface 25
Engineering, materials & building 21
Networks & trade 19
Time, sky & calendars 9
Water, land & settlement 8
Chance & decision 7
Logistics & operations 7
Navigation & discovery 4
Sound & performance 3
Community-posed 2
Conflict & collapse 2
Subject
Medieval Latin institutions and prosopography 169
Material practice and ritual action 111
Islamic and Persianate source transmission 97
South and Southeast Asian inscriptional polities 93
Greek textual transmission 83
African manuscript and source ecologies 79
Early Christian and Syriac transmission 75
East Asian manuscript and canonical transmission 73
Technical, recipe, and scientific texts 57
Jewish textual transmission 51
Egyptian papyrological and epigraphic worlds 48
Ancient Near Eastern inscriptions and succession 47
Steppe and Central Asian nomadic and Silk Road sources 42
Americas pre-Columbian and contact-era records 41
Judaism 40
Roman documentary and epigraphic culture 33
Syriac Christianity 33
Theology as a science (sacred doctrine) 24
Mediterranean maritime and connectivity sources 19
Medieval Jewish history 11
Hebrew Bible 8
Lost literary works 8
Dulia (veneration of the saints) 6
Mesopotamian administrative and accounting practice 6
Oceanic and Pacific oral-dominant source worlds 6
Lens
Manuscript and scribal production 347
Channel dissociation 75
Epigraphy and damaged inscriptions 49
Market equilibrium, price, and arbitrage 34
Stemmatics: reconstructing transmission trees from shared error 26
Survival analysis: hazard rates and half-lives 26
The comparative method and natural experiments 24
Information theory: redundancy, error-correction, and compression 22
Rank-size laws and heavy tails 22
Statistical physics: transport, percolation, criticality, and tipping points 19
Capture-recapture and unseen-species estimation 18
Diffusion of innovations and contagion 18
Costly signaling and verification 17
Network topology and centrality 17
Taphonomy and survivorship bias 17
Dialect geography: isoglosses, distance-decay, and seriation 16
Operations research: queueing, inventory, and logistics optimization 14
The molecular clock: constant-rate change as a dating instrument 10
The experience curve: learning by cumulative production 3
Kill dataset
Union catalogues 169
Critical apparatus 97
Egyptian papyri & ostraca 85
Published editions 77
Dated colophons 63
Dunhuang & Turfan hoards 59
Archaeological survey 50
Digitized texts 50
Scholastic citations 50
Chant & liturgy 49
Charters & chanceries 49
Epigraphy 49
Cuneiform archives (CDLI) 46
Witness counts (Pinakes) 46
East Asian canons 34
Byzantine book epigrams (DBBE) 33
Prices & wages 33
Astronomical tables 32
Cairo Geniza 32
Mesoamerican codices 32
Islamic manuscript culture 25
Archaeometry 22
Byzantine lead seals 17
Art & iconography 16
Not yet built 15
Fragments & bindings 12
Christian Nubia 11
Numismatics 10
Letter collections 9
Khipus 8
Hadith isnads 6
Romano-British tablets 6
Novgorod birch bark 5
The corpus itself 5
D-PLACE / Seshat 3
Browse the full kill dataset registry →
Author
Place
Status
What the tags mean
- Open — no decisive result yet
- Already answered — the specific result is already published; the citation is on the item’s page
- Anticipated · untested — the literature anticipates the direction, but this exact test has never been run — open to kill
- No prior located — a dated search found no prior formulation (in thin fields this measures the literature’s thinness, not originality)
- Supported — a registered prediction held up in data
- Falsified — a registered prediction was refuted
- testable — a quantitative prediction + kill-dataset is registered
- Shepherd-triaged — an authoritative Fable-authored verdict; shown as the pills above and the only tier in the headline numbers
- provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending — an Opus-authored first pass, not yet shepherd-confirmed and excluded from every headline figure
- awaiting prior-art check — hunt open — no triage yet; found a prior yourself? open it and weigh in
Triage state
Place & era tags are curatorial, authored by Claude (Opus 4.8).
Showing 1–9 of 9 matching conjectures.
in the scholastic classroom the objection-side authorities functioned as a memorized bank of classic difficulties — an objection had to be recognizable to master and audience to carry disputational force, so the same hard sayings of Augustine, Aristotle, and Jerome were recycled…
Packet-switched content distribution splits a file into chunks that travel independently and reassemble at the destination; the medieval university book trade did the same with texts. Under the pecia system, stationers chunked an exemplar into pieces rented out separately, so a single…
Connects the disputatio's argumentative architecture to the material sources of quotation: the objections a scholastic author stages are the tradition's stock counter-texts, harvested from commonplace collections and classroom memory, whereas the constructive respondeo forces the author back to the authority's actual wording…
writing a line-by-line commentary on an authority permanently converts a scholastic's citation channel to that authority from mediated to direct across his whole subsequent output. The commentary forces desk-level engagement with a complete exemplar; afterwards the master quotes from his own annotated…
the Paris condemnation of 1277 did not suppress the condemned theses, it anonymized them. Discussing a censured position under its author's name risked complicity, but the disputational machine could not run without its hardest objections, so masters kept the content and severed…
the Catena aurea project (begun 1263) was a supply shock to Aquinas's citation economy. Compiling it built him a personal bank of newly translated Greek patristic excerpts, so afterwards his Greek-father citation volume should jump discontinuously across all genres of his writing…
the Sentences-commentary genre drifted from pastoral coverage to speculative concentration on a measurable schedule. Disputational prestige, not curricular duty, set the incentives, and prestige lived in Book I's frontier problems — divine knowledge, future contingents, intension of forms — so between 1250…
after about 1300 the working Aristotle of the arts faculties was a florilegium of exam-ready tags, not the translations. Oral disputation and examination rewarded fixed memorizable slogans, and once the popular auctoritates handbooks compiled them, the tag-list became the effective text —…