T_331
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.06.03, day 157
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S12, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, half-raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P3 The Floor Rises
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SHP: save, has potential (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 7.3
- Form
- 2.4
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 3
- Composition
- 2.4
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 85%
- Dark share
- 47%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 15
Peter's own rating
- Rating
- 8
“There is always something that can be done better.”Peter Yuill · 2026.07.02
Older engine
- V10C
- 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.
4 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: 0.044 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 3 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
“A concentric-arc sheet close to R3: the arcs are fluent, the translucent passes are layered in a clear order and the rotation is strong. The black masses are flat inside, and there are small marks on the blank paper.”
Concentric arc strokes follow brush travel with dry-brush trailing edges; right-hand block cluster is more rectilinear but its strokes still read as made, with no clumsy joins.
WEAKEST Right cluster of stiff stepped rectangular blocks
STRONGEST Large black arc sweeping from top to centre
Measured dark modulation 0.044 is flat; black arc and right black block are uniform inside. Grey bands show crackle, grain and stepped density, giving four tonal plateaus.
WEAKEST Interior of the main black arc band
STRONGEST Stepped grey arcs in lower-left quarter
Several translucent grey arc passes overlap in readable order beneath the black; the stepped segments build depth from the outer pale rings inwards to the black.
WEAKEST Black block in right cluster covers earlier greys
STRONGEST Overlapping translucent arc segments lower left
Large arc wheels the eye from top-left around to bottom; empty circular void top-centre is shaped and active; right cluster echoes the rotation and counters the mass.
WEAKEST Bottom-left edge, crowded with pale arcs
STRONGEST Open curved void at top centre
Ink controlled with dry-brush edges; small blot lower right and grey specks in top-right paper sit away from principal masses; crackle texture in greys reads as paper character.
WEAKEST Stray ink blot near lower right edge
STRONGEST Dry-brush trailing edge on black arc
4 distinct places, 0 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 4 distinct places, 15 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.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 53% crisp, 40% soft or bloomed, 7% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
4 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 7.3.
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.