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The diaspora exponent
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
The diaspora exponent. Sublinear scaling laws — the urban-economics finding that infrastructure grows more slowly than city size — meet museum acquisition history. This conjecture claims the dispersal of a cuneiform site's tablets across the world's collections scales sublinearly with the size of the find. The mechanism is that tablets did not scatter one by one: large finds were sold and donated in blocks, whole lots passing to a single museum at a time, so each doubling of a site's total finds adds proportionally fewer new holding collections and dispersal saturates. Across sites, the number of distinct collections holding a provenience's tablets should therefore grow roughly as the square root of the tablet count — a log-log slope near one half, tightly fit — far below the proportional scattering that piecemeal, tablet-by-tablet dispersal would have produced.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across CDLI proveniences with >= 30 tablets, the regression of log distinct holding collections on log tablet count has a slope between 0.35 and 0.65 with R^2 >= 0.6; a slope >= 0.85 (proportional scattering) or <= 0.2 kills it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: CDLI proveniences crossed with holding collections (in house).
In the kill-dataset registry:
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 is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
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/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Settlement-scaling theory establishes exponent-fitting on pre-modern archaeological count data (Ortman/Bettencourt), and the tablet-dispersal phenomenon is documented at scale (~500k tablets, 200+ collections), but the specific regression (collections-count on tablet-count per provenience) was not located. In-house computable (collections_raw held).
Sources cited by the triage
- Ortman et al., 'The Pre-History of Urban Scaling', PLOS ONE 2014 — Scaling exponents on archaeological counts
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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