T_250
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.21, day 114
- Size
- 70 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S3, Tanxi Jing Pi, 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
- 69%
- Dark share
- 31%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- bloom 8, water stain 2, ring 3
Older engine
- V7
- 4
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.
5 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: 0.054 (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
“A gestural wave sweep with some tonal life in the right diagonal. It is ordinary in form, layering and composition, and cellular water blooms in the central sweep mark the surface. It is closest to R2.”
Wave sweep from left down through centre to right reads as a coherent form; left dark mass is lumpy and frayed, so some bulk remains.
WEAKEST Left dark mass, ragged lobed outline
STRONGEST Right diagonal dark sweep following brush travel
Right dark band shows streaks and stepped density; five tonal steps, modulation 0.054; left black mass flatter inside.
WEAKEST Left dark mass interior fairly uniform
STRONGEST Right diagonal band with streaked grey grading
Pale grey sweeps lie under darker strokes at right and left; overlaps readable, but only two or three passes and little ordered build-up.
WEAKEST Centre where droplets blur the grey pass
STRONGEST Dark diagonal over pale grey wash, right
Wave-like curve gives direction and shapes the empty top paper; right edge black fragment and busy lower right feel crowded.
WEAKEST Crowded right edge with cut-off black mass
STRONGEST Wave curve carrying eye left to right
Clusters of ringed, cellular drop blooms sit inside the central grey sweep, visible in colour view; read as water spotting rather than chosen structure.
WEAKEST Cellular water-drop blooms in centre sweep
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks in right diagonal band
6 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 6 distinct places, 13 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 10 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 17 edge segments, 12% crisp, 53% soft or bloomed, 35% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
5 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 1.0A 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.