AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Songs copied blind
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)
By the time Iryeon compiled the Samguk Yusa in the 1280s, the hyangchal orthography of its fourteen hyangga was a dead technology: no copyist could still read the songs, only redraw them. Opaque copying has a diagnostic error profile — variants arise from stroke and shape confusion between similar characters, not from the phonetic slips and synonym substitutions that betray comprehension. The surrounding Literary Chinese prose, legible to every copyist, is the built-in control. The work thus carries a natural experiment on itself: two textures, one transmission, two error chemistries. Prediction: classifying variant readings across the early witnesses (the 1512 Imsin-bon against earlier fragmentary printings), graphic-confusion substitutions will make up at least 80% of variants inside the hyangga but under 40% inside matched samples of the prose — the hyangga's graphic share at least double the prose share (primary clause: the doubled graphic share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the digitized early editions of the Samguk Yusa (the 1512 Imsin-bon and earlier fragments, digitized by the National Library of Korea and the Kyujanggak) with the variant registers of the standard critical editions of the hyangga.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: classifying variant readings across the early witnesses (the 1512 Imsin-bon against earlier fragmentary printings), graphic-confusion substitutions will make up at least 80% of variants inside the hyangga but under 40% inside matched samples of the prose — the hyangga's graphic share at least double the prose share (primary clause: the doubled graphic share; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the digitized early editions of the Samguk Yusa (the 1512 Imsin-bon and earlier fragments, digitized by the National Library of Korea and the Kyujanggak) with the variant registers of the standard critical editions of the hyangga.
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 dead hyangchal orthography of the Samguk Yusa's fourteen hyangga and their difficult transmission are known, but the specific natural-experiment prediction (graphic-confusion variants >=80% in the hyangga vs <40% in matched prose) was not located as a variant-classification test.
- Standard critical editions of the hyangga; digitized 1512 Imsin-bon (National Library of Korea)
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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