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Chess isoglosses
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)
Chess isoglosses. As chess spread from India across Eurasia, both its objects and its rules mutated regionally: the piece carved as an elephant in the Islamic world became the bishop in Europe, and the moves themselves varied between documented regional rule sets. Linguistics maps dialect boundaries as isoglosses; the conjecture applies the same idea to a game. If pieces and rules traveled together as one cultural package, then the geographic boundaries between piece-form types recovered from excavated gaming pieces should coincide with the boundaries between rule variants attested in texts — the elephant-to-bishop line falling where the rule-variant line falls. Material typology and textual rules would then be two independent readings of the same transmission map, and systematic mismatch between them would kill the conjecture.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Map the geographic boundaries between chess piece-form types from the find typology (e.g. where the elephant form gives way to the bishop form) and, independently, the boundaries between documented rule variants from the textual rules; measure spatial coincidence between the two boundary sets. Primary clause: form boundaries fall within a 200 km buffer of the corresponding rule-variant boundaries significantly more often than under a null of randomly repositioned boundaries (permutation test, p < 0.05), for a majority of attested boundary pairs. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
find typology vs textual rules.
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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.
In the atlas
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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
The components are documented: elephant-name/form persistence across the bishop rule change (alfil/slon), the Iberian late-15th-century move reform, and uneven regional adoption of other rule changes; the joint isogloss-style mapping — piece-FORM typological boundaries tested against documented rule-variant boundaries — was not located.
- History of chess (rule-change geography overview) — Documented uneven rule adoption + name persistence
Predictions
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