AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary

Tracing locks the size

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Tracing locks the size. Chinese connoisseurship separates traced copies (mo) from freehand copies (lin) by brush quality — a judgement call. But tracing is mechanical transfer and locks absolute dimensions, while freehand copying rescales freely. Catalogue metadata alone should therefore bifurcate attested copy-pairs into a size-locked spike and a size-free tail, handing connoisseurship a falsifiable mechanical anchor it has never had.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (the verdict follows it): among at least 40 documented painting-and-copy pairs in the two Palace Museum catalogues, the distribution of absolute log size ratios is bimodal, with a spike of pairs agreeing within 2 percent (mounting tolerance) and a diffuse remainder. Secondary clause: membership in the size-locked spike agrees with published traced-versus-freehand classifications in at least 75 percent of the cases where such a classification exists.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the National Palace Museum (Taipei) Open Data catalogue and the Palace Museum (Beijing) online catalogue, both of which publish dimensions for originals and attested copies.

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

Connoisseurship literature explicitly states that mo tracing reproduces composition and scale very closely while lin freehand copying does not — the mechanical mechanism is anticipated; the catalogue-metadata bimodality test on log size ratios is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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