AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The figure must be drawn without lifting
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)
On Malekula and its neighbours, knowledge was stored as executable geometry: the sand figures Deacon recorded are single-line designs traced through a lattice without lifting the finger or retracing, tied to graded ritual knowledge, to named myths, and in Seniang belief to the road of the dead itself — where a guardian ghost erases half the figure and lets pass only the one who can redraw it (Layard, Stone Men of Malekula, 1942). The corpus is executable: you hold it only if you can run it. Bernard Deacon, dead at Malekula of blackwater fever in 1927 at twenty-four, left the largest recorded repertoire — some ninety figures published posthumously from his notes (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 64, 1934, ed. Wedgwood) — and Marcia Ascher's graph-theoretic analysis (Ethnomathematics, 1991) showed how strict the genre's Eulerian discipline is. Executable knowledge dies differently from narrative: it cannot survive as gist; a half-remembered figure is not a shorter figure but a failed one. As the graded societies that licensed transmission contracted under depopulation and conversion, whole figures should have dropped from the repertoire rather than simplified within it. Vanuatu sand drawing is now UNESCO-listed (proclaimed 2003) and the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta's fieldworkers have documented the living repertoire — so the attrition since 1927 is, for once, measurable. Prediction: concording Deacon's published corpus against the sand-drawing documentation assembled by the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta for the UNESCO safeguarding process, fewer than half of Deacon's figures will be attested as still performable, and the survivors will be disproportionately the figures Deacon records with public rather than grade-restricted contexts (primary clause: the under-one-half survival rate; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a figure-level concordance between Deacon's corpus (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 64, 1934) and the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta / UNESCO sand-drawing inventories, coded per Ascher's graph classification (Ethnomathematics, 1991).
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: concording Deacon's published corpus against the sand-drawing documentation assembled by the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta for the UNESCO safeguarding process, fewer than half of Deacon's figures will be attested as still performable, and the survivors will be disproportionately the figures Deacon records with public rather than grade-restricted contexts (primary clause: the under-one-half survival rate; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a figure-level concordance between Deacon's corpus (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 64, 1934) and the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta / UNESCO sand-drawing inventories, coded per Ascher's graph classification (Ethnomathematics, 1991).
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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, Oceania wave 2: knowledge carried in chant, notation, skin, sand, court testimony and object rather than script alone, every item anchored in real objects, corpora, voyage and mission records, court archives and published testimonia with datable loss mechanisms (the 1862-63 raids, the 1819 ʻAi Noa, the 1835 Rēkohu invasion, the 1848 Orsmond manuscript loss); five candidates dropped in disjointness and honesty checks — Lapita motif attrition (overlaps registered cj-099-lapita-entropy), Jaussen-list reading protocol, stick-chart typology-provenance and Kumulipo internal analysis (wave-1 ground), and Kiribati maneaba traditions (no kill of adequate strength); disjoint from breadth-oceania wave 1.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Deacon's posthumous corpus of Malekula sand figures (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 64, 1934) and Ascher's graph-theoretic analysis of their Eulerian discipline (Ethnomathematics, 1991) are published, and the living repertoire has been documented by the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta for the 2003 UNESCO listing — so both ends of an attrition measurement exist. But the primary clause is a figure-level concordance showing fewer than half of Deacon's figures still performable, with survivors skewed to public rather than grade-restricted contexts, and that concordance was not located as ever having been built; the kill is honestly flagged not-yet-built. Adjacent.
- A. Bernard Deacon, 'Geometrical Drawings from Malekula and Other Islands of the New Hebrides', ed. Camilla Wedgwood, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 64 (1934)
- Marcia Ascher, Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas (Brooks/Cole, 1991)
- John Layard, Stone Men of Malekula (Chatto & Windus, 1942)
Predictions
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