← All conjectures · East Asian text cultures
Blocks copy shapes, brushes copy sounds
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Blocks copy shapes, brushes copy sounds. The manuscript-to-woodblock interface should flip the error spectrum of a scripture. A copyist holds the text in his ear for the span of a phrase (self-dictation), so his slips are homophones; a block carver — often semi-lettered, cutting mirror-reversed graphs from a sheet pasted face-down — holds only strokes, so his slips are lookalikes. Where both witness classes survive in bulk for one text, the production mode should be recoverable from the variant typology alone, a decidable signature of hand versus knife.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Collate a large sample of Dunhuang manuscript copies of the Diamond Sutra and early printed witnesses (from the dated 868 scroll onward, plus early canon prints) against the CBETA base text of T 235; classify singleton variants as homophonic substitution, graphic-confusion substitution, or other. Primary clause (verdict follows it): the ratio homophonic-to-graphic among manuscript-witness singleton errors is at least twice the same ratio among print-witness singleton errors. Secondary: eyeskip omissions triggered by repeated graphs occur at similar rates in both classes, isolating substitution type as the discriminator.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: IDP's several hundred catalogued Dunhuang Diamond Sutra copies, including the dated 868 printed scroll (Or.8210/P.2), collated against the CBETA/SAT text of T 235. Resolvable against IDP plus CBETA.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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 is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
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); 248-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_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Paleographic studies collate manuscript against woodblock witnesses of single sutras and classify phonetic versus graphic substitutions (e.g. the Nanatsu-dera study), anticipating both the typology and the comparison; the ratio-flip test as a decidable production-mode signature on Diamond Sutra witnesses is un-run.
Predictions
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