I Ching Lights
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| 38. Divergence (睽 kuí) | 47. Exhaustion (困 kùn) | |
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32. Perseverance (恆 héng)
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31. Attraction (咸 xián) | |
Electronic divination device. 18 white cold cathode tubes periodically display one of the 64 hexagrams from the I Ching (易經).
The I Ching dates from 400 BC. The text of the I Ching is a set of oracular statements represented by a set of 64 abstract line arrangements called hexagrams (卦 guà). Each hexagram is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines (爻 yáo), where each line is either Yang (an unbroken, or solid line), or Yin (broken, an open line with a gap in the center). With six such lines stacked from bottom to top there are 26 or 64 possible combinations, and thus 64 hexagrams represented.
The King Wen sequence is the traditional (i.e. "classical") sequence of the hexagrams used in most contemporary editions of the I Ching. The King Wen sequence has been shown to contain within it a demonstration of advanced mathematical knowledge.
In his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (1703) Gottfried Leibniz writes that he has found in the hexagrams a base for claiming the universality of the binary numeral system. He takes the layout of the combinatorial exercise found in the hexagrams to represent binary sequences, so that ¦¦¦¦¦¦ would correspond to the binary sequence 000000 and ¦¦¦¦¦| would be 000001, and so forth.
The same binary system underlying the ancient and mystical I Ching sequence forms the basis of modern computing.
King Wen sequence