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Bachet's weights at Harappa
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)
Bachet's weights at Harappa. Bachet's classic weight problem asks for the smallest set of standard weights that can weigh out every required quantity on a balance — a combinatorial optimisation whose solutions depend on whether weights may sit in one pan or both. The Indus Valley cities ran a famously uniform metrology: cubical stone weights in a fixed series of denominations, standardised across Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and their trading towns for centuries. The conjecture is that this series is no arbitrary convention but an approximate solution to Bachet's problem: the attested Indus denominations should come close to the optimal minimal set for spanning the range of market quantities actually weighed, so that few weights cover many transactions with minimal redundancy. Compute the optimal sets under realistic balance rules, set them beside the attested series, and the match can be scored — the coin problem solved in stone, millennia before anyone posed it on paper.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Compute optimal minimal weight sets (Bachet solutions under both one-pan and two-pan rules) for the range of market quantities implied by Indus commerce, and set them against the attested denominations from excavated weight corpora. Primary clause: the attested series achieves at least 90% of the coverage efficiency of the computed optimal set of equal size (quantities spanned per weight), and outperforms the median of random denomination sets of equal size drawn from the same range. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
attested denominations vs computed optimal sets.
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
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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
no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05)
The attested Indus binary-to-decimal denomination structure is well documented (weights balanced to ~0.5-1%), and the Frobenius/coin-problem literature is mature pure mathematics, but no source was located computing an optimal minimal spanning set for balance-weighing and comparing it to the attested denominations. No prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05) — a dossier blank-join item, and computationally cheap to resolve.
- Harappa.com, 'Uniqueness of Ancient Indus Weight System' — The attested denomination structure
Predictions
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