AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The painter sees three figures ahead
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 painter sees three figures ahead. Mixtec screenfold painters worked along red guide-lined boustrophedon registers laid out before painting. If composition ran on a short planning horizon, spacing should compress as the painter approaches each register turn — the same crowding-at-the-end signature papyrologists read in line justification — making the planning horizon, counted in figure-slots, a measurable constant of a hand or workshop rather than an imponderable of style.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it): in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1, inter-figure spacing in the final quarter of each register run is at least 15 percent tighter than in the middle two quarters, in at least 70 percent of registers. Secondary clause: the onset of compression, in figure-slots before the turn, is constant within a codex to plus or minus one slot but differs between the two codices — the horizon is a workshop parameter.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the British Museum's digitized Codex Zouche-Nuttall (Am1902,0308.1) and the online facsimiles of the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1 via FAMSI and the Austrian National Library.
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
no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-11)
Mixtec codicology documents red register guide-lines, boustrophedon order, and the division of labour between painter-scribes, but no prior formulation was located, even qualitatively, of end-of-register spacing compression as a measurable planning horizon; the nearest prior is papyrological line-justification crowding, a different medium (search dated 2026-07-11).
Predictions
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