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Selfish Roman roads
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)
Selfish Roman roads. Transport science distinguishes two ideal networks: the Wardrop user equilibrium, in which each traveler selfishly takes the route fastest for himself, and the system optimum, in which a planner routes everyone so as to minimize total travel time. The two diverge precisely where congestion makes one traveler's choice cost others time. The conjecture is that Roman road alignments fit the selfish solution, not the planned one: routes grew from the individually optimal choices of travelers and local builders, so surveyed alignments should match user-equilibrium predictions over the cost surface better than system-optimum predictions. The empire's hand appears as the correction: imperial upgrade projects should target exactly the links where the two solutions diverge — the congestion externalities that selfish routing creates and only central investment can fix.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For each corridor in the least-cost GIS vs surveyed alignments dataset, compute both the Wardrop user-equilibrium route and the system-optimum route over the cost surface, and measure the surveyed Roman alignment's deviation from each. Primary clause: surveyed alignments lie closer to the user-equilibrium solution than to the system optimum (paired test, p < 0.05, holding in a majority of corridors), and documented imperial upgrades fall disproportionately on the top-quartile links by divergence between the two solutions. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
least-cost GIS vs surveyed alignments.
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
Least-cost-path versus surveyed-alignment testing is an active method on exactly this object (via XVII, Sandy Flanders, Roman Britain suitability studies; the empire-wide Itiner-e geometry dataset now published), which covers route-optimality analysis; the game-theoretic discrimination (Wardrop user-equilibrium vs system optimum, imperial upgrades targeting congestion externalities) was not located as applied to Roman roads.
- 'A GIS-based analysis of via XVII' (Bracara-Asturica LCP study) — LCP vs surveyed alignment
- Itiner-e: empire-wide Roman road geometry dataset, Scientific Data — Enabling dataset
Predictions
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