AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Dead emperors haunt the recut
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)
Dead emperors haunt the recut. Taboo observance is a writing-time behavior, but block recutting is a tracing-time behavior — a Yuan workshop recutting a Song edition pastes the old print face-down and cuts what it sees, so the dead dynasty's omitted strokes ride through untouched, while a Yuan scribe copying the same text by eye and ear silently restores the full graphs. Taboo in the print tradition is heritable in a way manuscript taboo is not; dating by taboo should therefore systematically over-age recut editions by exactly one recutting generation, a decidable artifact with a known mechanism.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Take Yuan-Ming recuttings of Song editions identified as recuts on independent grounds (colophons, carver names, paper). Primary clause (verdict follows it): at least 80 percent of Song-taboo loci observed in the Song original remain observed in the recut, versus under 30 percent observance of the same taboos in contemporaneous Yuan-Ming manuscript copies of the same works. Secondary: replacement leaves cut during later repairs within the same recut editions drop the taboos, dating the repair stints.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Zhonghua zaizao shanben facsimile series, which reproduces Song originals and identified Yuan-Ming recuts leaf by leaf with taboo strokes visible, plus the taboo inventories in standard bihui reference works.
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); 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
That taboo forms carried over in blocks and recuttings complicate taboo-based dating is a known caveat of Chinese descriptive bibliography (banben xue) and of taboo-dating method discussions, anticipating the mechanism; the quantified over-aging comparison of recuts against contemporaneous manuscripts is un-run.
Predictions
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