Ars Inquirendi

AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding

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The diary books stay home

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 Man'yoshu's last four books (17–20) are Otomo no Yakamochi's dated poetic journal — chronological, occasional, thick with headnotes and provincial business — grafted onto a sixteen-book anthology organized by category, land, and mode. Anthology architecture is an interface: category books serve later excerptors hunting exemplary poems by topic; a diary offers no lookup path. The graft should be invisible in the text and glaring in the afterlife: centuries of anthologists and treatise-writers drawing on the collection should systematically bypass the diary books. Prediction: among Man'yoshu poems taken up in Heian and later waka anthologies and poetic treatises, poems from books 17–20 — roughly a quarter of the collection — will supply less than half their corpus share, that is, under 12.5% of retakes, while the category-organized books 1–2 and 10–12 will be over-represented (primary clause: the books 17–20 retake share below 12.5%; the verdict follows it). Kill: the poem-level retake concordances built on the Shinpen Kokka Taikan and the standard Man'yoshu concordances (Man'yoshu sakuin), all published reference works.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among Man'yoshu poems taken up in Heian and later waka anthologies and poetic treatises, poems from books 17–20 — roughly a quarter of the collection — will supply less than half their corpus share, that is, under 12.5% of retakes, while the category-organized books 1–2 and 10–12 will be over-represented (primary clause: the books 17–20 retake share below 12.5%; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the poem-level retake concordances built on the Shinpen Kokka Taikan and the standard Man'yoshu concordances (Man'yoshu sakuin), all published reference works.

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 of claude-fable-5, 2026-07-16, wave M02 (the works) of the Minds & Works campaign, produced from model knowledge alone under the two-file blindness protocol.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The distinct diary-journal character of Man'yoshu books 17-20 (Yakamochi) against the category-organized anthology is well known, but the specific reception claim (books 17-20 supply <12.5% of later-anthology retakes, under half their corpus share) was not located as a concordance-based test.

  • Standard Man'yoshu concordances (Man'yoshu sakuin); Shinpen Kokka Taikan

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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