Coates david

#protein folding Dataset Open access Sep 2026

Touchstone

Touchstone alpha v1.0 What it is Four HTML files that open in any browser, offline, sending nothing anywhere. Plus two Python twins of the same engines for terminal or Colab work. Copyright © 2026 David Coates, MIT. A touchstone is a piece of dark stone: rub gold against it and the streak tells you what the metal really is. These files do that to a number. Who it's for Anyone holding a number and wondering whether it means anything. That's you specifically — working alone, without a supervisor, on patterns nobody has checked. But it's equally a teaching instrument, because the honest answer is usually no, and it shows you why. The one rule everything follows A number is worth something only once it has predicted something it hadn't already seen. The sequence predictor counts only terms a rule got right after the data pinned the rule down. The relation test folds the rows so every row is predicted by a fit that never saw it. The scan re-runs itself on shuffled data so you see what searching alone produces. None of these are extras — they're why the answers mean anything. What each file does touchstone.html — the main one. Four modes: Test a relation — does one quantity predict another? Fits five shapes, folds the rows, leads with the error. Try everything — 43 forms × every quantity, with a shuffle null and a bare-quantity control. My own numbers — paste two columns. Name a number — what fraction or constant is this, and can you actually tell it from its rivals? sequence_predictor.html — what comes next, and is there a rule at all? Exact rational arithmetic. Measured: 1,257 exact verdicts, 1,257 correct blind predictions, zero wrong. 800 runs of pure noise produced no verdict at all. predicted_vs_actual.html and domain_scan.html — the comparison and the wide search, standalone. What's in it 14 domains, 613 rows — metallic means, polygons, Platonic solids, phyllotaxis, the earthquake scale, the periodic table, stable isotopes, the solar system, the genetic code, amino acids, proteins, Fisher's irises, and the sequence library itself as data. Every column computed from a definition or taken from a named source. 52 integer sequences, each generated from its definition and checked against known identities, each with its OEIS number. Six languages — English, Français, Deutsch, Español, Italiano, 中文 — including every verdict and the decimal comma. What it refuses to do It won't tell you a number is meaningful because it looks tidy. 179.976% rounds to 180.0% and means nothing. It won't let a search pass as a discovery — 6,570 combinations produce a big number whether or not anything's there. It won't call 3/2 a match without telling you 2^(7/12) is 0.11% away and your number isn't that precise. It won't claim a sequence underlies a domain when the rows just happen to be countable. What it has actually found Kepler's law from the data, exponent 1.4978 against 3/2, and deterministic to 1.5 parts per million by the reverse-fit test. Gutenberg–Richter to 4 × 10⁻¹⁴%. λ − 1/λ = n exactly. The n-gon interior angle exactly. Your P1/P2 frequency equipartition holding at 0.19% and the mass-weighted version failing at 12%. That the Moon corrupts every orbital relation because its figures are Earth-relative. How much it's been tested Roughly 5,000 assertions across eight suites, 387 cross-language cases proving the JavaScript and Python agree field by field, a sweep over 94,170 domain-pair-form combinations, an independent audit re-deriving every statistic with numpy and scipy, and four headless browser suites. 58/58 manifest. That testing found real bugs in my own work — a slope invented from rounding noise, rows silently vanishing from results, a dead language function leaving a menu empty. The tool's standards applied to the tool.

Coates david · Zenodo (CERN European Organi... · 0 citations

#protein folding Dataset Open access Sep 2026

Touchstone

Touchstone alpha v1.0 What it is Four HTML files that open in any browser, offline, sending nothing anywhere. Plus two Python twins of the same engines for terminal or Colab work. Copyright © 2026 David Coates, MIT. A touchstone is a piece of dark stone: rub gold against it and the streak tells you what the metal really is. These files do that to a number. Who it's for Anyone holding a number and wondering whether it means anything. That's you specifically — working alone, without a supervisor, on patterns nobody has checked. But it's equally a teaching instrument, because the honest answer is usually no, and it shows you why. The one rule everything follows A number is worth something only once it has predicted something it hadn't already seen. The sequence predictor counts only terms a rule got right after the data pinned the rule down. The relation test folds the rows so every row is predicted by a fit that never saw it. The scan re-runs itself on shuffled data so you see what searching alone produces. None of these are extras — they're why the answers mean anything. What each file does touchstone.html — the main one. Four modes: Test a relation — does one quantity predict another? Fits five shapes, folds the rows, leads with the error. Try everything — 43 forms × every quantity, with a shuffle null and a bare-quantity control. My own numbers — paste two columns. Name a number — what fraction or constant is this, and can you actually tell it from its rivals? sequence_predictor.html — what comes next, and is there a rule at all? Exact rational arithmetic. Measured: 1,257 exact verdicts, 1,257 correct blind predictions, zero wrong. 800 runs of pure noise produced no verdict at all. predicted_vs_actual.html and domain_scan.html — the comparison and the wide search, standalone. What's in it 14 domains, 613 rows — metallic means, polygons, Platonic solids, phyllotaxis, the earthquake scale, the periodic table, stable isotopes, the solar system, the genetic code, amino acids, proteins, Fisher's irises, and the sequence library itself as data. Every column computed from a definition or taken from a named source. 52 integer sequences, each generated from its definition and checked against known identities, each with its OEIS number. Six languages — English, Français, Deutsch, Español, Italiano, 中文 — including every verdict and the decimal comma. What it refuses to do It won't tell you a number is meaningful because it looks tidy. 179.976% rounds to 180.0% and means nothing. It won't let a search pass as a discovery — 6,570 combinations produce a big number whether or not anything's there. It won't call 3/2 a match without telling you 2^(7/12) is 0.11% away and your number isn't that precise. It won't claim a sequence underlies a domain when the rows just happen to be countable. What it has actually found Kepler's law from the data, exponent 1.4978 against 3/2, and deterministic to 1.5 parts per million by the reverse-fit test. Gutenberg–Richter to 4 × 10⁻¹⁴%. λ − 1/λ = n exactly. The n-gon interior angle exactly. Your P1/P2 frequency equipartition holding at 0.19% and the mass-weighted version failing at 12%. That the Moon corrupts every orbital relation because its figures are Earth-relative. How much it's been tested Roughly 5,000 assertions across eight suites, 387 cross-language cases proving the JavaScript and Python agree field by field, a sweep over 94,170 domain-pair-form combinations, an independent audit re-deriving every statistic with numpy and scipy, and four headless browser suites. 58/58 manifest. That testing found real bugs in my own work — a slope invented from rounding noise, rows silently vanishing from results, a dead language function leaving a menu empty. The tool's standards applied to the tool.

Coates david · Zenodo (CERN European Organi... · 0 citations

#software testing Dataset Open access Sep 2026

Touchstone

Touchstone alpha v1.0 What it is Touchstone is a reproducible statistical and algebraic screening tool for distinguishing supported mathematical relationships from search-induced patterns in sequences and numerical datasets. A methodological analysis tool for testing whether apparent mathematical structure in data is genuinely supported, or whether it is an artefact of searching many possible transformations and relationships. At its core, it does two related jobs. First, on the sequence side, it tests whether a proposed recurrence or rule has actually earned the right to be called a pattern. Rather than rewarding a formula simply because it fits the terms used to discover it, Touchstone requires out-of-sample confirmations: a rule must correctly predict further terms that were not needed to fit it. This is an explicit safeguard against overfitting and “guessing” structure from short sequences. Second, on the table-scan side, Touchstone searches numerical datasets for unusually strong relationships between columns and transformed versions of those columns. It can examine raw quantities, reciprocals and other predefined forms, but it does not treat the strongest observed correlation as meaningful by itself. Instead it passes every candidate through a sequence of null tests designed to measure how easily an equally impressive result could arise by chance after searching the same field. The scan uses three main safeguards. A fixed-hit permutation test asks whether the winning relationship remains unusual when the data are shuffled. A more conservative edge null asks how extreme the winner is relative to the strongest result found anywhere in the entire shuffled search, thereby accounting for the fact that the software looked across many column pairs and forms. Finally, a raw-quantity control distinguishes cases where a transformed equation adds something from cases where the underlying raw variables already explain the signal. The final verdict is deliberately simple. Touchstone can report an equation when the transformed relationship survives the statistical gates and improves materially on the raw relationship; raw when the underlying quantities carry the signal without justification for elevating a transformed formula; or no claim when the evidence is insufficient. The purpose is not to manufacture equations, but to make it comparatively difficult for an attractive accidental pattern to be promoted into one. A significant part of the project is therefore calibration rather than discovery. The current version has been run end-to-end on 500 synthetic pure-noise domains, each with eight columns and sixty rows. Using exactly the same search and verdict procedure as for real data, it produced equation verdicts in 4.8% of noise domains, raw verdicts in 0.4%, and no claim in the remaining 94.8%. That experiment provides an empirical type-I calibration for the complete procedure rather than assuming that two nominal 5% gates behave independently. Touchstone also measures the effective search width rather than merely counting every algebraic form as a separate opportunity. Many transformations are rank-identical on a given dataset, so the software records how many genuinely distinct ranked forms were searched. This makes the multiple-search correction more interpretable and avoids exaggerating the size of the search space. The project is intentionally conservative. Tied columns are permitted by the permutation test but are flagged as an interpretive limitation; guarded inversions are inherited from the mathematical definitions rather than introduced opportunistically for scanning; very small permutation probabilities are reported at the correct finite-simulation floor; and numerical ratio names such as 3/2 are accompanied by a measured false-naming rate. In practical terms, Touchstone is best thought of as a pattern-claim filter. You give it a short sequence or a numerical table, and it asks: Is there enough evidence to say that this is an actual rule or equation, rather than a pattern that looks convincing because we searched until something appeared? Its contribution is not the general idea of over-determination, which is well established in recurrence guessing and statistical model checking, but the combination of a clear verdict vocabulary, search-aware null testing, raw controls, and empirical calibration of how often the complete procedure makes a claim on pure noise.

Coates david · Zenodo (CERN European Organi... · 0 citations