T_151
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.03.27, day 89
- Size
- 70 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S3, Tanxi Jing Pi, raw
- Inks
- MB1, MB2, MB3
- Phase
- P1 Warm-up
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SA: save, archive (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 5.2
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.2
- Ink cover
- 87%
- Dark share
- 42%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- ring 4, tide line 2, other 8, bloom 5, water stain 5
Older engine
- V7
- 6
How the number was made
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 5 times by Claude Opus 5.5 against three reference paintings (R1 to R3), each read independent of the others. How the engine works.
Three views of one sheet.
Left, the photograph. Centre, the tone stretch the model is shown beside it: the darkest 45% of tones spread over the whole range, so flat black, banding and stains show. Right, every pixel as the measuring code classes it: cyan black ink, deep teal translucent grey, stone the palest ink, near black bare paper.
3 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Life inside the black: 0.067 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 of 5 qualities.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. Where reads differ, they differ by one rung; close calls resolve down.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“The crescent sweep is strong and the left stroke has good banding, but the right mass is bulky and lobed. The background washes are cloudy with tide edges, and a ring and a blot mar the surface. It sits near R2.”
Left crescent stroke sweeps coherently to bottom centre; right dark mass holds its walls but is bulky, with blobby finger lobes along its upper edge.
WEAKEST Right mass: bulky lobed top with drip-like fingers
STRONGEST Left curving tail stroke following brush travel
Left stroke shows banding and veining; centre-right mass has grain and cloudy greys; the darkest right-hand core reads mostly flat black.
WEAKEST Right black head nearly flat, dense core
STRONGEST Banded arcs inside left curving stroke
Grey background washes, dry-brush sweeps at bottom, and dark crescent read as distinct passes; overlaps legible but order not building depth across sheet.
WEAKEST Pale left background washes vague, cloudy
STRONGEST Dry-brush grey strokes legible under dark crescent
One crescent movement carries the eye from left to the heavy right mass; top-left grey wash area is murky leftover space with a stray blot.
WEAKEST Upper-left quarter of washes, dead and unshaped
STRONGEST Long crescent sweep crossing sheet left to right
Ring mark beside the right dark mass top, tide-edged cloudy washes top-left, isolated blot top-left, and cloudy pale patching inside the central mass visible in colour view.
WEAKEST Cloudy tide-edged washes and ring near right mass
STRONGEST Grainy feathered edges on left crescent stroke
7 distinct places, 3 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 7 distinct places, 24 mentions in all across 5 reads; the number in each ninth is how many times a flaw was named there. Reads agreeing on a place strengthen the evidence for one flaw; they do not multiply it. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 7 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 18 edge segments, 33% crisp, 61% soft or bloomed, 6% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
3 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
4 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.2A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.2.
Engine v23.8, 5 reads. Fixed arithmetic, the same for every painting; the constants were set on 24 randomly chosen paintings so the median sheet scores 5. The scale is relative to this archive, not to painting in general, and a difference of less than half a point between two paintings is noise.