THE TAO OF COMPUTERS
çddf,faa,afa,aaf,faf,ffa,aff
«Computers
·-------------------

¹again an old Chinese invention
A   secundary   education  student  of
nowadays knows that the binary systems
can  reduce  all  numbers to zeros and
ones.    An   apparatus   that   makes
electronic  calculations  has  only to
know   the   difference   between  two
situations:   on (1) and out (0).  The
numerical  values 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8 are returned by 1, 10, 11, 100, 101,
110, 111, 1000.

What  most  people  don't know is that
the   first  example  of  this  binary
manner  of  writing - the basis of all
modern computer languages - dates back
5,000  years ago, when Fu Xi wrote the
FIRST  CHING,  the BOOK OF CHANGES.  A
Chinese  fortune  teller  takes 50,000
leaf   stalks,  throws  one  away  and
divides   the   remaining  two  piles.
According  to  an  old and complicated
rite  he  keeps  on  throwing the leaf
stalks  away until the remaining piles
of leaf stalks represent the values of
6,  7,  8 or 9.  He draws even numbers
as  a  broken line which represent the
YIN  and  he  draws  odd  numbers as a
continuous   line,   the   YANG.    By
repeating  this  operation  five times
he's  making a hexagram, one of the 64
which are in the FIRST CHING.

The  German  philologist-mathematician
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz disco- vered
the  binary  quotation about 400 years
ago.    Also   Leibniz  saw  a  mystic
meaning   in  the  twofold  of  binary
calculation:   what  Fu Xi called YIN,
¶çddf,faa,afa,aaf,faf,ffa,aff
¹was  put  on  a  level  by  Leibniz as
cosmic  emptyness,  nothing,  0 and he
saw  YANG as God, 1.  In 1964 he built
a  binary calculator called the Kicked
Calculator,   which   could  multiply,
divide  and  extraction of roots:  the
primitive  proto  type  of  our modern
calculator.

Six  years  later  Leibniz received an
unusual   letter   from   China.   The
epistle  from  the  Jesuit  missionary
Joachim  Bouvet  contained  remarkable
similitudes  between Leibniz' own work
and  the numerical system of the FIRST
CHING.   As Bouvet told in his letter,
each  of  the  64 hexagrams correspond
with a binary number between 0 and 63.
Leibniz  was  so  knocked out by these
parallels  that  he  sent his study of
the binary calculation to emperor Kang
Hsi,  a  famous patron of Chinese arts
and sciences.  As expected the Chinese
emperor felt nothing but deep contempt
for  every- thing from the West.  Only
in  the  40s  of  our  century, when a
compact  elec-  tronic  link mechanism
was   invented  which  could  see  the
difference  between  zeros  and ones -
the   transistor   -   the  number  of
enormous  calculations  that has to be
executed  in  the  binary  systems was
made possible.

The nice thing of the binary quotation
in  combination with micro-electronics
is  that  there's no limitation of the
returning  and  operation  of numbers.
Nowadays   most  computers  return  in
eight    digits    called   "8-bytes".
Although   there're  already  16-  and
32-bit   bytes  available,  the  8-bit
standard  can  be ranged in 256 ways -
¶¼enough  combinations to translate each
letter,    each    number   and   each
punctuation  of  the  FIRST CHING into
Dutch  - and to write the instructions
to express it.

Like  Fu  Xi realised 5,000 years ago,
is  to  express  the  "nature"  of the
universe in zeros and ones.

¢EXCALON/JUSTICE¹













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