AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Wang Chong quotes from the bookstall
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)
Wang Chong says he was too poor to own books and read at the Luoyang stalls, remembering at a glance. Stall memory is semantic: it keeps what a passage meant, not how its characters ran. The interiority claim: his lifelong self-image as the man who possessed the classics without possessing books is checkable in his citations — they should diverge from the received text unusually often, and diverge like memory (synonym and paraphrase, sense intact), not like a copyist's eye (graphic confusion). Prediction: among marked quotations of the Analects and the Odes in the Lunheng, the verbatim-divergence rate exceeds the corresponding rate in the Baihutong's quotations of the same classics, and, subordinately, a majority of Wang Chong's divergences are sense-preserving lexical substitutions rather than graphically similar character errors; primary clause: the comparative divergence rate against the Baihutong. Kill: the digitized received texts of the Lunheng, Baihutong, Analects, and Mao Odes at the Chinese Text Project; the computation is a quotation-alignment audit with divergence classification.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: among marked quotations of the Analects and the Odes in the Lunheng, the verbatim-divergence rate exceeds the corresponding rate in the Baihutong's quotations of the same classics, and, subordinately, a majority of Wang Chong's divergences are sense-preserving lexical substitutions rather than graphically similar character errors; primary clause: the comparative divergence rate against the Baihutong.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the digitized received texts of the Lunheng, Baihutong, Analects, and Mao Odes at the Chinese Text Project; the computation is a quotation-alignment audit with divergence classification.
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.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation instance (prompt file and existing-titles list only; no repository, web, or prior-art access), 2026-07-16, campaign Minds & Works wave M01.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Wang Chong's self-image as the bookless stall-reader is a known anecdote from the Lunheng, but the specific claim that his classical quotations diverge more than a control's AND diverge like memory (synonym/paraphrase) not like copyist's eye was not located as a test.
Predictions
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