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Interpolators scan like their century
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)
Interpolators scan like their century. Joins Sanskrit metrics to stemmatics as a dating instrument: the epic shloka admits licensed variations (the vipula forms) whose frequencies drifted historically toward the stricter classical norm, and an interpolator cannot help writing the verse rhythm of his own training. Passages rejected by the critical edition, if genuinely later, should carry a measurably more classical metrical fingerprint than the constituted text they imitate — the reviser's hand betrayed not by vocabulary but by an unconscious prosodic accent.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Machine-scan the constituted text and the Appendix I passages of a sample of Mahabharata parvans. Primary clause: the pathya share among shloka half-verses is at least 3 percentage points higher in the appendix material than in the constituted text of the same parvans. Secondary: the archaic rarer vipulas are rarer still in the appendices. The verdict follows the pathya-share clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the GRETIL electronic text of the BORI critical edition of the Mahabharata, constituted text and appendices separately encoded, with the vipula tables in Hopkins's The Great Epic of India as 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
Vipula/pathya statistics as a dating and interpolation-detection instrument for the epic is published methodology (Hopkins's tables; Yardi's statistical stratification of the epic by anushtubh style), strongly anticipating the mechanism; but the specific comparison of Appendix I passages against the constituted text of the same parvans has not been run.
- E. W. Hopkins, The Great Epic of India (1901), vipula statistics by stratum
- M. R. Yardi, The Mahabharata: Its Genesis and Growth — A Statistical Study (BORI, 1986)
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