AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Dresden's mistakes arrive in batches
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Claim (verbatim)
The Dresden Codex is a compilation by several hands from several older exemplars of unequal quality, and its almanacs carry a built-in audit: in a 260-day almanac the distance numbers must sum to 260, and each reached day must agree with the running count. A single careless scribe strews arithmetic errors uniformly across his stint; a faithful copyist of mixed exemplars reproduces his sources' errors in batches. The spatial statistics of the codex's mistakes therefore adjudicate what kind of made thing it is — one workshop's careless product, or a conservative copy of a heterogeneous library. Prediction: tabulating every arithmetic inconsistency in the 260-day almanacs (distance-number sums and day-reach mismatches), per-section error counts will be overdispersed with a variance-to-mean ratio of at least 3, and steps in error rate will coincide with published scribal-hand boundaries (primary clause: the variance-to-mean ratio of at least 3; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: read the red and black numeral columns of every almanac from the SLUB Dresden open digitization, verify each almanac's sums and reaches, and aggregate errors by codex section and hand division. Kill: the SLUB Dresden open high-resolution digitization of the Codex Dresdensis (digital.slub-dresden.de), with Förstemann's public-domain commentaries as reading aids.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: tabulating every arithmetic inconsistency in the 260-day almanacs (distance-number sums and day-reach mismatches), per-section error counts will be overdispersed with a variance-to-mean ratio of at least 3, and steps in error rate will coincide with published scribal-hand boundaries (primary clause: the variance-to-mean ratio of at least 3; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: read the red and black numeral columns of every almanac from the SLUB Dresden open digitization, verify each almanac's sums and reaches, and aggregate errors by codex section and hand division.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the SLUB Dresden open high-resolution digitization of the Codex Dresdensis (digital.slub-dresden.de), with Förstemann's public-domain commentaries as reading aids.
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 composite, multi-hand, multi-exemplar character of the Dresden Codex is established, but the specific spatial-statistics prediction (per-section arithmetic-error counts overdispersed at variance/mean >=3, error-rate steps at scribal-hand boundaries) was not located as a test.
- V. Bricker & H. Bricker, Astronomy in the Maya Codices (2011); Forstemann
Predictions
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