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The singleton census
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Claim (verbatim)
The singleton census. Joins capture-recapture ecology to Greek philology: ecologists estimate how many species they have never seen from the ratio of species observed exactly once to species observed exactly twice, and the same arithmetic applies to books. Each surviving witness to a Greek work is a capture; the Pinakes catalogue, tabulating witnesses across tens of thousands of works, is thus an ecological sample of the ancient library, with singly-attested works playing the singletons and doubly-attested works the doubletons. From those two counts the Chao estimator computes a lower bound on the works never captured at all — the size of the lost Greek library. The conjecture predicts that singletons outnumber doubletons by roughly two-to-four to one, implying at least 40% as many wholly lost works as attested ones, and that the ratio holds steady across century-of-composition cohorts: loss behaved as a single sampling process, not a different regime per era.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In Pinakes, works with exactly one known witness outnumber works with exactly two by a ratio between 2:1 and 4:1; the resulting Chao1 lower bound implies at least 40% as many wholly lost works as attested ones; and the singleton-to-doubleton ratio is stable within +/-25% across century-of-composition cohorts from the 4th century BCE to the 12th century CE, i.e. loss behaved like a single sampling process rather than a different regime per era.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: Pinakes Greek works-by-witnesses counts (21.5k works). A singleton:doubleton ratio outside 2-4, or cohort ratios varying beyond +/-40%, kills it.
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 at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The exact method is published on a neighboring corpus: Kestemont et al. (Science 2022) apply unseen-species/Chao1 estimators with the singleton/doubleton logic to medieval literature survival. Application to Pinakes/ancient-Greek witness counts, the specific 2-4 singleton:doubleton band, and the cohort-stability clause were not located. Any resolution must position itself against Kestemont's method choices explicitly.
- Kestemont et al. 2022, 'Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture', Science 375 — Same estimator, medieval corpus
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