I Ching (Book of Changes)
Attributed to Fu Xi, expanded by King Wen, c. 1000 BCE — ancient.
The oldest continuously used analytical instrument on Earth: 64 hexagrams forming a complete state machine of situational change, each state carrying defined transition rules — prosperity seeding stagnation, splitting-apart preceding return. Leibniz took his binary arithmetic from its structure; the machine you are reading this on is a distant descendant. Not fortune-telling: cycle-position estimation, three thousand years before Markov.
Why the engine keeps this on the shelf
Kept as the oldest ancestor of the Loom — a finite set of states with published transition rules, which is what the strand model is, minus three thousand years of decimal places.
The record
- The core text — 64 hexagrams with their judgments and line statements, the Zhou Yi — dates to the early Zhou, roughly the ninth century BCE; the Ten Wings commentaries are considerably later, and the attribution to Fu Xi and King Wen is tradition rather than record.
- The oldest known manuscript copies are the silk texts excavated at Mawangdui in Hunan in 1973, from a tomb sealed in 168 BCE, whose hexagram sequence differs from the received order.
- The Leibniz story is usually told backwards: Leibniz had drafted binary arithmetic in De Progressione Dyadica in 1679, more than twenty years before the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent him the Fu Xi hexagram diagram from Peking in a letter dated 4 November 1701 — he recognized his own system in the figure, he did not derive it from there.
- Richard Wilhelm's German translation of 1924 reached English in 1950 as the Wilhelm/Baynes edition, published by the Bollingen Foundation with a foreword by C. G. Jung, and that is the version through which the book entered Western intellectual life.
Marked passages
To and fro goes the way. On the seventh day comes return. It furthers one to have somewhere to go.
Hexagram 24, Return — collapse always precedes regeneration in a defined sequence. The engine’s scenario trees are hexagram logic with more decimal places.
In the author’s own words
In the Yi there is the Great Extreme, which produced the two elementary Forms. Those two Forms produced the four emblematic Symbols, which again produced the eight Trigrams.
Xi Ci (Great Treatise), Appendix III, Sect. I, ch. 11, tr. James Legge (1882)
Then and now
Its Peace-into-Stagnation transition is a claim that no favourable state is terminal; V-Dem's 2026 report places global democracy levels back where they stood in 1978, with 44 countries currently autocratizing. Source: V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026 (10th edition)
The 64 hexagrams are six-bit strings, and the binary machinery Leibniz recognized in them now has a power bill: data-centre electricity is projected to roughly double from 485 TWh in 2025 to about 950 TWh in 2030. Source: IEA, Energy and AI / Electricity 2026
The oldest hexagram lesson is that expansion is a phase, not a direction: global fertility has fallen to about 2.25 births per woman from 3.31 in 1990. Source: UN Population Division, World Population Prospects 2024
More on this shelf
This text points at
The shelf exists because the engine reads it. See the Core, the projections, the sealed ledger, or all 81 texts.