AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Colophons don't heap
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)
Colophons don't heap. This connects a demographer's instrument with scribal diplomatics. Dates recalled or reconstructed from memory heap on round numbers; dates written down on the day itself do not. A colophon is written at the moment of completion, often with weekday and month attached for the closing blessing, while a biographical dictionary's death date is often fixed decades later from hearsay and inference. The two great date corpora of the Islamic book world should therefore sit at opposite ends of the heaping spectrum, and the size of the gap measures how much of the civilization's chronology was contemporaneous record versus retrospective reconstruction.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Among dated colophons, the share of AH years ending in 0 or 5 stays at or below 23% (against a 20% uniform null), while death dates in the major biographical dictionaries show a 0/5-ending share of at least 28%, and heaping in the dictionaries increases with the interval between the subject's death and the compiler's lifetime. Primary clause: the conjunction of the colophon share at or below 23% and the dictionary share at or above 28%; the verdict follows it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: FIHRIST dated-manuscript records (thousands of colophon years) against death dates extracted from al-Dhahabi and al-Safadi in the OpenITI corpus.
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
Age/date heaping is a mature demographic instrument (Whipple's index; A'Hearn–Baten–Crayen) and both Islamic date corpora exist in machine-readable form (Romanov's death dates; colophon corpora), but pitting contemporaneous colophon dates against retrospective biographical death dates on the heaping spectrum is an un-run application.
Predictions
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