AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The vault and the broadcast
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 vault and the broadcast. Japanese textual survival ran two opposite strategies, legible as opposite distributions in the union catalogue. Court literature survived by the vault: few, early, jealously guarded copies in aristocratic houses, where scarcity was the asset. Temple didactic literature survived by the broadcast: many copies, constantly recopied for preaching, none precious. Same centuries, opposite topologies — so witness-count and earliest-witness-date should trade off by institutional carrier, not by a work's age or fame, and works that switched carriers should switch statistics.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
From the union catalogue, sample pre-1400 works in (a) court genres (monogatari, nikki, private waka collections) and (b) temple genres (setsuwa collections, didactic tales, sermon literature). Primary clause (verdict follows it): class (b) has the higher median count of extant manuscript witnesses per work AND class (a) has the earlier median date of oldest extant witness — both inequalities must hold. Secondary: court works that escaped into temple or renga pedagogy (Ise monogatari is the type case) show class-(b) statistics.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Kokusho somokuroku union catalogue of Japanese books, whose per-work witness lists carry counts, holding institutions, and dates.
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 qualitative contrast is well known — court monogatari surviving in few jealously guarded aristocratic lineage copies, setsuwa and didactic literature surviving in many temple-recopied witnesses — but the union-catalogue test trading witness count against earliest-witness date by institutional carrier is un-run.
Predictions
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