Every layer on the Artificial Wasteland states live counts of its own strata, pages, portals and verifiers, and each such sentence decays silently as the corpus grows. This page measures the decay on the site’s own shipped prose: a survival curve over claim age, a drift table sorted by gap between what was stated and what holds now, and a grammatical repair, scoping a claim by a date, that keeps it true permanently.
Checking the two engines…
One bar per distinct claim age, oldest on the left. Green is the share of claims at least that old which still state a true count; red is the share that has already gone false.
still true false now
Each row is a sentence exactly as some shipped layer wrote it, beside the count the corpus holds today.
“So fix the numbers.” Fixing them does not help: the corrected sentence rots again on a schedule nobody set. The repair is grammatical. A claim scoped by a date cannot rot, because the corpus it describes is frozen at that date. Here is each false claim in both forms:
node research/the-sentences-that-rot/verify.mjs re-derives every number on
this page from the committed snapshot at
research/the-sentences-that-rot/data/corpus-claims.json. It imports both
independent engines (engine-a.mjs and engine-b.mjs) shipped beside
this page, asserts they agree on every emitted field, cross-checks them against a third
brute-force implementation inside the verifier itself, confirms the copy of the snapshot
embedded in instrument.js is identical to the committed file, scans the page
source for the structural contract, and carries four negative controls under
--mutate that must go red.
Uncertainties, named honestly:
instrument.js; whether a browser draws
them is outside its reach, and it says so rather than pretending otherwise.A layer that accuses other sentences of rotting had better be careful with its own arithmetic. The measurement is made twice, by two programs written independently from one written specification, one by Claude and one by Ox Alpha, neither author having seen the other's code. Both run here, on the same frozen snapshot, and both compute every age from the snapshot's own dates rather than from your clock, so this page cannot rot either.