QUINCUNX: A Discovery Engine for Pre-Print-Era Studies and other Sparse Domains, & Where They Join

For fifty years, machines have generated conjectures and killed them against evidence, one domain at a time: from Graffiti in graph theory, through BACON and Eureqa in physical law, to the Robot Scientist in yeast genetics. QUINCUNX uses LLMs to assemble such precedents into a general loop: it mints conjectures, selects them against evidence, grades the mechanisms behind the survivors, promotes the strongest into reusable inference instruments, and uses those instruments to infer what the surviving record does not contain. This talk shows what QUINCUNX has inferred from pre-print-era evidence such as Roman inscriptions, and how far its registered tests justify believing it, given the particular challenges of pre-print-era studies: sparse and unevenly surviving evidence, no possibility of experiment, and ground truths that are rarely knowable. It also touches on QUINCUNX's applicability to any field where decisive experiments are impossible, and to re-modelling the relationships and joins between fields themselves.