AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The coverage boundary is a printing press
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)
Every survival census run against Ganjoor risks a systematic confound that honesty requires naming and then turning into a testable claim. Ganjoor is a corpus of printed Persian poetry: its texts are keyed from published divans and critical editions. A poet is therefore present on Ganjoor if and only if some editor, at some point, prepared and printed his text - which is a different condition from whether his poetry survived in manuscript. There exist poets whose divans survive in one or several manuscripts, catalogued in de Blois and Safa, that have simply never been edited and printed; by construction they are absent from Ganjoor though their text exists. The claim is that this print-filter, not manuscript survival, is what Ganjoor absence actually measures: absence on Ganjoor should be predicted far better by the non-existence of a printed edition than by the non-existence of manuscripts. If so, every raw Ganjoor-presence census understates true survival by exactly the set of edited-but-unprinted-and-thus-absent poets, and that set is itself measurable. Prediction restated: among attested poets who do have surviving manuscripts but no printed critical edition, Ganjoor presence is near-zero - so the honest survival figure sits above the raw Ganjoor count by a knowable margin, and the boundary of the corpus is a press, not a shelf of manuscripts.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: among poets attested in de Blois and Safa as having surviving manuscripts but no printed or critical edition, fewer than 15 percent will have any author corpus on Ganjoor, whereas among poets with a printed edition the presence rate will be far higher - print-status, not manuscript survival, predicting Ganjoor presence (primary clause: the sub-15-percent Ganjoor-presence rate for the has-manuscripts / no-edition set; the verdict follows it). Edition-status is coded from de Blois' and Safa's bibliographies, and the test voids if fewer than 30 poets can be placed in the has-manuscripts / no-edition category.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: de Blois' Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey and Safa's Tarikh-i adabiyat dar Iran for each attested poet's manuscript-and-edition status, cross-tabulated against presence or absence on Ganjoor (ganjoor.net); the operation is the association between printed-edition existence and Ganjoor presence.
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 by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, Persianate wave instrument-anchored on the open Ganjoor corpus (ganjoor.net) with the Cambridge Shahnama Project as the second instrument where manuscript transmission is the question. Every Kill names one corpus and one countable/positional/citation-geometric operation, thresholds sit far from 1, disambiguation and name-matching rules are pinned inside each prediction, and coverage guards separate what Ganjoor holds (print-era critical editions) from what existed. DISJOINTNESS: the Nizami/Khamsa transmission ground and de Blois vol. V's Nizami dated-manuscript census are owned by minds-w02 (item 'The Khamsa is bound, not born') and are NOT re-posed here; the Rumi Masnavi return-formula operation on Ganjoor is owned by minds-w02 and avoided; the Ferdowsi age-statement / reign-boundary operation on the Ganjoor Shahnameh is owned by minds-w01 ('The Shahnameh keeps the poet's birthdays') and the Shahnama interpolation-topography / illustrated-extent / folio-grid / dispersal / defacement operations are owned by fable-w01 (#14), fable-w03 (#24) and fable-w05 (#3,#4,#11) on the Cambridge Shahnama Project - so the Daqiqi item here reuses the Ganjoor Shahnameh and Cambridge Shahnama instruments ONLY under a distinct survival-by-embedding operation, flagged in its Kill; prose Kalila wa Dimna transmission is owned by fable-w01 (#22) and fable-w07 (#11,#22), so the verse-Kalila point is folded into the Rudaki item and no standalone Kalila/Sindbad-nama item is posed. Safa's Tarikh-i adabiyat and de Blois' Bio-Bibliographical Survey are reused as census controls under attested-poet/attested-title operations distinct from the minds-w02 Nizami dated-ms count. NOTE cleared: the 'Mu'jam' in islamicate-openiti (#4) is Yaqut's geographical Mu'jam al-buldan, a different work from Shams-i Qays's prosody al-Mu'jam used here - no collision. DROPPED CANDIDATES: (a) Nizami's own lists / khamsa-imitation chains of lost romances - dropped as Nizami is owned by minds-w02; recast as the non-Nizami verse-romance census (item 12). (b) A standalone Sindbad-nama / verse-Kalila item - dropped, prose Kalila owned by fable-w01/w07; the verse-Kalila loss folded into item 1. (c) A raw-bayt genre-size comparison (three Ghaznavid panegyrists vs one lyricist) - dropped as FALSE on the numbers (Farrukhi's surviving divan alone is large), replaced by the within-Ganjoor pre-Mongol survival-concentration op (item 6). (d) A smooth recency-gradient census - replaced by the mechanistic Mongol-caesura step (item 4). CONFIDENCE FLAGS carried inside the items: Rudaki's 100,000-couplet attestation and 'Unsuri's ~30,000-bayt divan are classical topoi (kept out of the load-bearing clauses, which rest on the hard surviving counts); the exact women-poet roster and the Khayyam cross-attribution magnitude are MODERATE and primary clauses are phrased to survive the uncertainty.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Ganjoor's own project documentation states that the corpus is keyed from printed divans, and de Blois's survey - the conjecture's named coding source - records manuscript-versus-edition status poet by poet, so the mechanism is fully described in print. The rate itself is un-run: no one has cross-tabulated the has-manuscripts/no-edition poets against Ganjoor presence. Nor is the answer quite true-by-construction, because the survey's edition-status coding is decades old and poets unprinted as of de Blois may have been edited and digitized since - which is exactly the slack the 15-percent threshold would measure.
- F. de Blois, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey, vol. V (2nd rev. ed., London, 2004), per-poet manuscript and edition notices
- Z. Safa, Tarikh-i adabiyat dar Iran, bibliographic notices of unedited divans
- Ganjoor project documentation (ganjoor.net), describing the corpus as digitized from printed editions
Predictions
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