AI I Ching Diviner

With the advent of Generative AI, many I Ching divination sites appeared.

I too created one as an experiment which I called Yishi (易士). You can find it at https://yishi.castingiching.com (you will need a free ChatGPT account to access it).

 

 

There are two ways of using it:

• Just ask your question. Yishi will generate a response using the yarrow stalks method and will provide an interpretation. For example:
      "Should I move out of this city?"
  
  
• Provide the answer you obtaind with another method. You just add the number of the received hexagrams and the moving lines before the question. For example, if you asked the same question and got the hexagram 18 with the 3rd and 5th lines changing, you can write:
     "18.3.5 Should I move out of this city?"
  
  

You will get an explanation of the meaning of the received hexagram in the the context of your question.

Don't take it too literally! Yishi is not meant to replace your own reading, it's just a suggestion to supplement your understanding of the response. It might lead to consider a different perspective.

WARNING: generative AI are unpredicatble, I have no control on the output and I make no claim on the correcteness of the outcome. Consider it as an experiment on the perceptions of AI minds.

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Cast a Hexagram online

As mentioned in a previous post, I've created an application to cast hexagrams online. A compact version of this app is visible in the "Cast a Hexagram" box on each page. The user interface is rather minimal so I thought of giving some explanation here on how to use it.

Quick reference

Cast a hexagram

The basic function is, not surprisingly, casting a hexagram. Each line is generated using random events caused by users moving the mouse, or clicking, on the small image. When the right amount of randomness is collected, a line is generated with the yarrow stalks probabilities. Moving lines are drawn in red, non-moving lines in black.

The line generation is not instantaneous: it requires the user to move the mouse (or click) a few times before a new line can be generated. This is done to avoid bias in the user behaviour (e.g. clicking always the same point in the image) that could destroy the randomness of the casting process.

Hitting on the Reset button (at the bottom left) clears all the enthropy collected up to that point and restart the process.

Record lines

You can also generate the hexagram yourself (e.g. by tossing coins) and record the outcome using this app: use the small buttons at the bottom right (6,7,8,9) to enter the lines one by one. The rightmost button (backspace) allows you to delete the last line in case you made a mistake.
This could be useful if you just want to read the response online but you don't like using software for casting the hexagram.

Get the reading

Once all the lines have been generated, the corresponding hexagram number appears. If there are moving lines, both the response and the relating hexagram numbers are shown (but not the relating hexagram itself).

To get the meaning of the hexagrams you can click on their numbers. You can choose which translation you want to be redirected to by selecting it in the combo box. By default you will get the Wikipedia definition of the hexagram.


Please send me any comment or suggestion you may have to make this little app more useful to you.

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Computer casting

There are currently many sites and applications that will generate a hexagram for you. Most of them offer links to commentaries to directly get an interpretation of the hexagram and some also have the possibility to switch between the yarrow stalks and the three coins method probabilites.

While, conceptually, casting hexagrams is an extremely simple task for a computer, there are drawbacks that you should be aware of.

First of all, generating true random number on a computer is extremely difficult. In most cases the program will use the default pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) which, usually, will trade speed for accuracy and generate numbers that are not random at all.
A PRNG will generate a sequence of numbers that is completely fixed once an initial seed is given, however some of them are able to generate sequences that appear to be random to the most common statistical tests. If unbiased randomness is important to you, you should check whether the software you're using has a good PRNG or not.

Second, using a program to cast the hexagram may lack that feeling of a direct connnection between the user and the response: you click a buttom and you instantly get a line (or even an entire hexagram). The experience of counting, shuffling, throwing, etc., is completely taken away, just a click and you're done!
This may be a problem for some (me, for example) and may discourage them from using casting software; others, instead, like exactly the fact that the response is immediate and they see a profound connection of the response with the exact instant in which the question is formulated.
Being a matter of personal preference, it will be up to you to determine if using software is for you or not.

If you come across a softare hexagram generators, to decide if you are going to use it or not, you may want to investigate if it uses one (or more) of these strategies:

1. Use the random number generator available to the language/operating system the software runs on.
2. Use a hardware true random numbers generator (e.g. using white noise radio signals, nuclear decay, ...).
3. Use the date and time to link the hexagram to the time it is cast.
4. Incorporate element from the user (e.g. mouse movement, keyboard tapping).

I wrote a small line hexagrams caster, which uses the two last strategies mentioned above to increase the participation of the user to the casting process. The applet collects random bits from the users mouse movents and clicks and use them to generate the lines (with yarrow stalks probabilites). You can see it in the right bar of this site.
Clicking on the numbers below the response will get you to one of the many sites that offer I Ching commentary text.

Please note that it is not very mobile-friendly (it's somhow bothersome to have to tap many times on the image), I hope I'll have the time to improve it some day.

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