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Cistercian Voronoi
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)
Cistercian Voronoi. The Cistercian order expanded by filiation — mother abbeys founding daughter houses — under statutes and economic pressures that discouraged crowding, since each abbey lived off its own granges and lands. That is the setup of competitive exclusion in ecology, where territorial organisms space themselves into regular tessellations. The conjecture is that the order's foundation map behaves accordingly: daughter houses should form a spatial pattern governed by a detectable minimum-distance rule, more regular than random settlement, approximating a Voronoi-like partition of the countryside. The predicted exception is economic: along the wool routes, where commercial gravity outweighed the spacing norm, the minimum-distance rule should be measurably violated. Foundation geodata would reveal a monastic ecology with exactly one commercial anomaly.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
From the foundation geodata of Cistercian houses, compute nearest-neighbor distances by foundation date and test the point pattern against complete spatial randomness using Ripley's K and nearest-neighbor statistics. Primary clause: the pattern shows significant inhibition at short range (p < 0.05, with a significantly positive fitted hard-core radius), and among pairs violating that minimum distance, a disproportionate share lie on documented wool-trade routes (odds ratio ≥ 2 versus non-violating pairs). The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
foundation geodata.
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.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Imported conversation (verbatim harvest) · model: claude-fable-5
Origin: operator conversation with Claude Fable 5 at max effort, conducted 2026-07-03, relayed verbatim by the operator into the shepherd session on 2026-07-04. No ModelRun exists for the original generation (it happened outside the pipeline); this transcript file is the canonical capture. Transcript path: docs/generated/conjecture_harvest_fablemax_20260703.md. Model (operator-attested, not pipeline-recorded): claude-fable-5. Novelty disclaimer (verbatim, load-bearing -- rule 4): "Same caveat as before, doubled: at 100 items across all of archaeology and history, some of these will have cousins in the literature I can't check. What I can guarantee is the format — each links two things not normally linked, and each names the dataset or measurement that would kill it."
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Historical-GIS work on Cistercian expansion uses day's-travel distance parameters and maps filiation networks; a formal Voronoi/competitive-exclusion minimum-distance analysis of daughter-house geodata, with wool-route corridors as the predicted violation locus, was not located.
- 'The Foundation of Cistercian Monasteries in France 1098-1789' (historical-GIS thesis) — GIS expansion analysis with ~30km parameters
Predictions
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