AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The vase turns its back
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 vase turns its back. Maya polychrome cylinders pose a closed-loop composition problem, and workshop painters solved it the way a tailor does: by giving the garment a seam and placing it at the back. Because these vessels were presented and used along a principal viewing axis fixed by the palace scene's enthroned figure, the junction where the rollout design's two ends meet — the least resolved strip of the circumference — should sit diametrically opposite the principal figure: a planned blind spot, not an accident of drawing.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In Kerr rollout photographs of single-scene court vases, define the seam as the vertical strip of lowest combined figural and glyphic density. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the seam falls within the third of the circumference diametrically opposite the enthroned or principal figure in at least 65 percent of vases, against a 33 percent chance baseline. Secondary clause: seam strips carry filler elements (vegetation, stacked vessels, drapery, scene dividers) at at least twice their corpus-wide rate.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Kerr Maya Vase Database (mayavase.com), whose published K-number rollout photographs allow seam location and principal-figure position to be scored directly on the open corpus, without new photography.
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); 278-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_w05_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W05 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. A platform output-limit resume occurred before the single Write; no additional tool calls or information ingress occurred.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Composition of Maya cylinder scenes as wrap-around designs organized around a principal viewing axis is established in Kerr-corpus scholarship, which anticipates a planned front and back; the seam-location-vs-principal-figure quantification with a chance baseline is un-run.
Predictions
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