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The rounding gradient
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Every scientist knows significant figures: precision reflects the stage of measurement, and aggregated numbers get rounded. Ur III accounting was a pyramid — daily receipts feeding monthly ledgers feeding annual balanced accounts — and the conjecture is that the pyramid has a measurable precision gradient: terminal digits of quantities are nearly uniform at the receipt level and increasingly dominated by sexagesimal round numbers at each aggregation tier, steeply enough that a tablet's hierarchical level can be classified from its numbers alone. The mechanism is institutional tolerance: clerks were permitted rounding at each consolidation step because exactness was a property of documents, not of grain. If it holds, many famous discrepancies between receipts and summaries are neither fraud nor loss but sanctioned rounding, and the audit logic of the first bureaucracy becomes readable in its last digits.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In Ur III texts, the proportion of commodity quantities ending in sexagesimally round values will rise monotonically across the three tiers: primary receipts, intermediate ledgers, annual balanced accounts, with a spread of at least 15 percentage points between bottom and top. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: a trend test (Cochran-Armitage) across tiers is significant at p<0.001 on samples of at least 2,000 quantities per tier. Secondary clause: a classifier using terminal-digit profiles alone assigns tier at better than 60 percent accuracy on held-out tablets.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
BDTNS (quantities with text-type classifications across the Umma, Girsu, and Drehem archives).
In the kill-dataset registry:
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.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 from internal knowledge only, with zero tool calls, and emitted directly as a single JSON text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Searched rounding and numerical practice in Ur III accounts. Ouyang & Proust document sexagesimal reconstruction/rounding in marginal numbers and Englund analyzes accounting precision and discrepancies, but no terminal-digit precision gradient across aggregation tiers or tier-classification claim was located.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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