AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The print threshold is a copy count
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 print threshold is a copy count. Whether the empire printed or brushed a monumental compilation was decided by intended copies, never by size — blocks are a fixed cost recouped over impressions, so a work wanted in three copies is cheaper brushed however vast it is. The canons, demanded by every ordained monastery, were printed at five thousand juan; the Yongle dadian and the Siku quanshu, larger only in juan but smaller in intended copies, stayed manuscript. The notion that these were too big to print is a back-formation; the compilers' own memorials argue distribution, and the corpus should separate cleanly on that variable.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Enumerate all pre-1800 East Asian works over 1,000 juan with known production mode. Primary clause (verdict follows it): every printed member of the set has documented distribution to at least 20 institutional recipients, and every manuscript-only member has at most 7 intended copies (the Siku's seven pavilion sets being the ceiling), with at most one exception tolerated across the whole set. Secondary: the sponsoring memorials of the printed canons argue reprint-on-demand economics explicitly.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Siku quanshu zongmu's own entries for the mega-compilations, the distribution registers of the printed canons in the dynastic huidian, and the Yongle dadian and Siku production records in the Ming and Qing shilu — all published, countable sources.
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
The fixed-cost economics of blocks versus copying is standard in Chinese book history, and the received account explains the Yongle dadian and Siku as unprintable by size — the very back-formation the conjecture attacks — so the question is anticipated on both sides; the systematic enumeration of >1,000-juan works by intended copy count is un-run.
Predictions
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