AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Seventeen graphs make a wage
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)
Seventeen graphs make a wage. The standard sutra format — seventeen graphs per column, fixed columns per sheet — is best explained as piece-rate labor technology, not aesthetics or numerology. A fixed grid makes the sheet a unit of pay and audit: sheets-per-juan becomes predictable, a paymaster can price a commission from a catalogue's juan count alone, and a scribe paid by the sheet has nowhere to pad. If the grid is a wage instrument, its adoption should track the institutionalization of paid copying — tightest exactly where colophons attest professional production, loosest in private devotional copies, in every century.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Sample dated Dunhuang sutra copies from the 5th through 10th centuries and record graphs per column. Primary clause (verdict follows it): copies whose colophons attest official or professional production conform to the 17-graph standard (mode 17, tolerance zero) at a rate at least 30 percentage points higher than contemporaneous private devotional copies, in every century sampled. Secondary: corpus-wide conformity rises from under half of dated 5th-century copies to over 90 percent of 8th-century official copies.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: IDP images of dated Dunhuang sutra copies — column format is directly countable on the photographs, and production class is read from the same items' colophons.
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); 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
The 17-graphs-per-column standard and its association with Tang official scriptoria are well established (Fujieda, Drège, and successors note official copies hold the standard while others range 16-19), anticipating the direction; the conformity-rate-by-production-class test with piece-rate interpretation is un-run.
Predictions
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