T_222
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.15, day 108
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S11, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- 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
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 64%
- Dark share
- 19%
- Tonal steps
- 6
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 7, bloom 3, other 8
Older engine
- V7
- 7
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.
6 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, one answer.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“The strong part is the dark fan of shards on the right, framed by an arc and grey washes. The upper-left wash is cloudy and blotched, the lower centre is empty, and stray drips land on it. An ordinary sheet, close to R2.”
Right dark mass has strong tapering shards following the stroke; left cluster's grey washes and the small dark blob at left are lumpy, so some bulk remains.
WEAKEST Upper-left grey wash: diffuse, cloudy lobe edges
STRONGEST Right-edge dark fan of tapering shards
Six tonal steps; dark modulation 0.067. Right mass has streaks and graded greys; upper-left grey wash reads cloudy and uniform.
WEAKEST Pale grey left wash flat and cloudy inside
STRONGEST Right dark mass with streaked, graded interior
Pale arc wash, mid-grey shards and black strokes read as separate passes on the right; on the left the overlaps soften toward haze.
WEAKEST Left cluster overlaps blur into grey haze
STRONGEST Right mass: dark strokes over legible grey shards
Two masses at the edges bracket a curving empty centre with circular dry-brush arc at top; lower-middle is dead paper with scattered drops.
WEAKEST Lower centre empty except scattered drips
STRONGEST Arc sweeping from left down to right mass
Upper-left grey wash is cloudy with mottled blotches and crease lines; speckled bloom spots in grey arc upper right; random drips across centre.
WEAKEST Cloudy blotched grey wash in upper left
STRONGEST Dry-brush arc texture at top centre
5 distinct places, 1 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 5 distinct places, 18 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 14 edge segments, 14% crisp, 71% soft or bloomed, 14% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
6 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
3 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.0.
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.