AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Seals stack like strata
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)
Seals stack like strata. Collector seals accumulate on Chinese paintings for centuries, and their placement is discussed as taste. The conjecture: placement obeys an interstitial packing rule — each collector takes the best remaining slot in a stable preference order, corners of the image proper first, then mounting joins, then interior voids — so position alone predicts impression chronology, and stratigraphic violations flag remountings and forged seals. Connoisseurship gains a physical stratigraphy.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it): on at least 30 heavily sealed scrolls whose seals belong to dateable collectors, there exists a single corpus-level slot-preference ranking such that seal date rank correlates with slot rank at Spearman rho of at least 0.6 on at least 75 percent of scrolls. Secondary clause: seals independently suspected as later forgeries sit as stratigraphic violations — early-dated seals in late slots — at several times the background violation rate.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the National Palace Museum (Taipei) Open Data high-resolution images, whose catalogue records seal identifications and the collectors' 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); 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
Collector-seal accumulation is used for provenance chronology and placement conventions are discussed qualitatively (positional customs; Qianlong's cataloguing impressions and their placement debated), anticipating position-as-history; the corpus-level slot-preference ranking with stratigraphic-violation forgery detection is un-run.
Predictions
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