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| 3 |
Chinese Characters Sorry for making you confused, Elaine. And thanks for helping me out, Water! I should be more careful when I wrote those things down. Yin/Yang is just a term, or symbol, or whatever. Yin is female, static, passive, ... while Yang is male, dynamic, active, ... Or dead vs. living as you guessed. Like most abstract concepts in Chinese philosphy, there is no clear defintion, you need to "appreciate" it. (And it's interesting to observe that the Taoism prefer Yin over Yang.) Suppose you need one of either Yin or Yang, then you have 2 possibilities(Yin/Yang). If you need a sequencial two, then you have 2*2 possibilities(YinYin/YinYang/YangYin/YangYang). Hence there are 2^3 (two to the power of three), that is, 8 states when conducting 3 drawings of Yin/Yang. Three drawing is something like a word (in Chinese, it's a "Qian"), and a dual word is used to represent the world which is devided to 2^3 * 2^3 = 8 * 8 = 64 states. (Chinese call a state as a "Gua".) Yi Jing is something like a 64-state table for you to look up. Or it's a 8-bit "convertor" (or "computer"??? the digital computer we are using now is also built upon discrete states and internal tables). I am just a fan to these things. Just think it's beautiful. The following link should be more than needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching |
| 2 |
Chinese Characters two conjectures on why 4 is not using four bars. 1.) suppose it's true, then how to deal with 5? or 6? it becomes more and more difficult to identify. hence a new strategy need to be implemented. 2.) it may be related to the classic Yi Jing which was originated almost three thousands years ago. Yi uses 3 drawings of Yin (--) and Yang (__) to represent the world. and that's 2^3*2^3 = 64 combinations. People were thinking this is enough. (not long ago, computers are still using 16 drawings of 0 and 1, that is, 64k states to represent the world. and even today, most cryptography are based on 128 drawings.) |