AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The paper ladder
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)
The paper ladder. This connects paper-trade standardization with the size distribution of surviving books. Paper left the mill in named full-sheet formats, and books were cut as the full sheet, its half, its quarter, its eighth; a warraq's stock was a ladder, not a continuum. If the trade was standardized, extant manuscript heights should be multimodal, with discrete rungs at fixed ratios generated by successive folds of a roughly 2:3 sheet, and with genre sorted onto the rungs, display Qurʾans and presentation copies at the top, personal taʿliqa notebooks at the bottom, because decorum and price both scaled with the rung.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Heights of dated Islamicate paper manuscripts from 700 to 1600 CE form a multimodal distribution: a dip test rejects unimodality at p<0.01, at least four modes appear, and adjacent-mode height ratios fall between 1.25 and 1.55 (the alternating ratios of repeatedly folding a 2:3 sheet). Primary clause: rejection of unimodality with at least four modes; the verdict follows it. Secondary: the adjacent-ratio window and the genre sorting across rungs.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: FIHRIST, which records height and width in millimetres for thousands of dated Islamic manuscripts in UK collections.
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: 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); 218-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w03_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W03 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
Standard full-sheet formats and the practice of cutting halves and quarters at constant proportions are documented in Islamic codicology (Déroche; Iranica), but the population-level test — dip-test multimodality of extant manuscript heights with fold-ratio spacing and genre sorting onto rungs — is un-run.
Predictions
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