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Capture-recapture in the anthologies
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Claim (verbatim)
Capture-recapture in the anthologies. Capture-recapture statistics estimate a population's size from the overlap between independent samples — tag fish, resample, count the recaptures. This conjecture treats the great Sanskrit subhashita anthologies — the Subhashitaratnakosha, Saduktikarnamrita, and Sharngadharapaddhati — as quasi-independent samples drawn from a floating ocean of freely circulating stanzas, so their pairwise verse overlaps yield a census of that ocean. Because the compilers worked in different centuries and regions, small overlaps should imply an enormous source population: standard estimators applied to the pairwise overlaps should put the floating corpus at 40,000-90,000 stanzas — dwarfing everything that survives — with the three pairwise estimates mutually consistent within a factor of 1.5. Overlaps so large that the estimates fall below 15,000 would mean the anthologists copied one another rather than sampling the ocean, and would kill it.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Lincoln-Petersen and Chao estimators applied to pairwise verse overlaps among the Subhashitaratnakosha, Saduktikarnamrita, and Sharngadharapaddhati imply a floating corpus of 40,000-90,000 stanzas, with the three pairwise estimates mutually consistent within a factor of 1.5; overlaps so large that estimates fall below 15,000 (anthologists copying anthologists rather than sampling the ocean) kill it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: a digitized overlap matrix from Sternbach's concordance of subhashita collections.
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/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
Capture-recapture on overlapping cultural catalogues is genuinely precedented (multiple-systems estimation of Modigliani's true painting population; bibliographic completeness applications), and the anthologies are standard Indology (Ingalls); the Sanskrit stanza-census via pairwise anthology overlaps was not located.
- Multiple-systems estimation of Modigliani paintings (The American Statistician) — The method on cultural catalogues
Predictions
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