The ever-normal fractile

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)

The ever-normal fractile. Newsvendor inventory theory sets stocking policy by a critical fractile — the service level dictated by the ratio of shortage cost to storage cost — and this conjecture finds that optimization solved a millennium before the theory, in the Chinese ever-normal granary. The changpingcang bought grain when prices ran low and released it when they ran high; if those trigger prices were tuned to balance the state's cost of famine against its cost of storage, then the width of the price band directly reveals the implied shortage-to-storage cost ratio. Matched against local grain-price series in Song and early Ming sources, purchases should cluster in years priced at or below roughly the 30th percentile of the local distribution and releases at or above the 75th, implying a critical fractile around 0.70-0.85 — and, tellingly, one stable across provinces, as a genuine optimization target would be. Triggers statistically indistinguishable from median-price years would kill it.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Matching granary purchase and release triggers to local grain-price series in Song and early Ming sources, purchases occur in years priced at or below the 30th percentile of the local price distribution and releases at or above the 75th, implying a critical fractile between 0.70 and 0.85 that is stable across provinces (standard deviation <= 0.08); triggers statistically indistinguishable from median-price years kill it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Quan Hansheng's Chinese grain-price compilations joined to granary regulations recorded in the Song Huiyao and Da Ming Huidian.

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

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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

The granary system has genuine quantitative scholarship (a digital-humanities corpus study of its institutional evolution; NBER work on ancient Chinese cycles) and the critical-fractile model is textbook OR, but reducing Song/Ming trigger prices to an implied cost-ratio fractile was not located.

'A Digital Humanities Study of Chinese Granary Systems', Histories 2023 — Quantitative granary scholarship, institutional

Predictions

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