AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Stone classics freeze the stream
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)
Stone classics freeze the stream. Joins the Kaicheng Stone Classics of 837 — the Tang state's carving of the Confucian canon on steles at the imperial academy — to the variance structure of the Dunhuang classical manuscripts: once an examination state publishes a physical reference text, teachers and copyists acquire both a collation target and a career incentive to conform. Canonized texts should show a variance collapse after 837, while Buddhist and popular texts, which no examiner checked, drift on unchanged.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Among Dunhuang manuscripts of the Analects and the Shangshu datable before versus after the mid-ninth century, primary clause: the substantive variant rate per 1,000 characters against the received text falls by at least half in the later group. Secondary: dated copies of a non-examination control, the Diamond Sutra, show no comparable drop across the same boundary. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) database of digitized Dunhuang manuscripts, collated against the received Shisanjing zhushu text with Ruan Yuan's 1815 collation notes (Jiaokanji) as the variant baseline.
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: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Dunhuang classics' textual mouvance against the Kaicheng official text is actively studied (e.g., the Lunyu florilegium work showing substantial divergence from the carved standard), but no study measures a before/after-837 variant-rate collapse with a Buddhist control text. The diachronic variance-collapse test is un-run.
Predictions
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