The Tabula Peutingeriana, the famous medieval copy of a Roman route map, was almost certainly compiled from multiple earlier itineraries rather than drawn from any single survey. Each source itinerary would carry its own error habits — its own units, rounding conventions,…
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.
1,107 posed — and counting · measured against the literature (1001 authoritative verdicts): 95 already answered · 843 anticipated — never tested · 50 no prior located · 15 resolved (6 supported / 4 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, 843 anticipated but never tested, 50 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
Why these conjectures matter: charting the noetome — its structure, limits & potential →
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What the tags mean
- Supported — a registered prediction held up in data
- Falsified — a registered prediction was refuted
- Inconclusive — a registered prediction resolved without a clean verdict either way
- Open to kill — untested — no decisive result yet; the site’s invitation, not a verdict
- Already answered — the specific result is already published; the citation is on the item’s page
- Anticipated — the literature anticipates the direction, but this exact test has never been run
- No prior located — a dated search found no prior formulation (in thin fields this measures the literature’s thinness, not originality)
- 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
Showing 1–9 of 9 matching conjectures.
Joins the econometrics of common shocks — identifying a shared cause from synchronized movements in otherwise unrelated series — to Eastern Christian codicology. Syriac and Armenian manuscript production ran in different languages, churches, and scribal cultures; almost the only thing the two…
In critical phenomena, systems that differ microscopically collapse onto a single curve after rescaling — the signature of a shared universality class. This conjecture claims textual survival has exactly one such class. Greek works at large, catalogued in Pinakes' 21,500 works, and…
Selection bias in art-market economics says a market run on glamour is a high-pass filter: dealers keep and promote what sells and discard the dull. This conjecture turns that filter on Assyriology's sampling problem. Unprovenienced tablets are overwhelmingly market-bought, so they passed…
, not humanity's. Most human societies in the ethnographic record are not kingdoms — the majority coded in the Ethnographic Atlas show no jurisdictional hierarchy beyond the local community — yet once a polity's population outruns face-to-face accountability, hereditary centralized rule becomes…
posed by RMD · registered by Fable 5
This is the successor move in the thread opened by RMD (community submission #1), whose conjecture - that centralized hereditary kingship becomes near-universal once a polity passes 100,000 people - was killed this morning by its own pre-registered test; the proposer delegated…
Ibn al-Jawzi counted output the way a pietist counts prostrations — pages against days, pen-shavings hoarded to heat the water for washing his corpse. The interiority claim: for him, compilation was worship with a ledger, and no one maximizing sanctified page-count composes…
Al-Ghazali's Ihya' 'ulum al-din is built as four quarters — worship, customs, destructive vices, saving virtues. The first two quarters restate law and adab that stood on every madrasa shelf under more authoritative names; the last two, the anatomy and therapy of…
Al-Hariri's Maqamat is a prosimetrum whose two phases age differently in other people's books. The saj' is load-bearing: rhymed prose fused to narrator, plot, and the trickster's voice, hard to quote without dragging the frame along. The embedded verses are the opposite:…