I found this by accident while analyzing the I Ching with code. 81% of hexagrams are locked in one chain, none stays in its original
position. You can verify it yourself in the browser. Has anyone seen this before?
The I Ching has influenced China for over 3000 years. I believe there must be a reason for that. In China, the I Ching is often
treated as mysticism. But I believe in science. The end of mysticism must still be science. So I did a lot of research and found a
unique pattern inside. I searched all the literature and found nothing about it. So I shared it here.
We truly live in an age where facts that are worth "maybe one sentence of space on Wikipedia" can be expanded into full-blown AI-coded interactive websites. I'm not sure how to feel about this. I think in this case it ascribes an inappropriate sense of grandeur: making a mathematical curiosity (and is the result even that surprising?) seem like some deep truth has been unveiled, or we finally found God's Number.
>> Zero fixed points — not a single hexagram occupies the same position in both orderings. The structural difference is total.
As a mathematical matter, the expected number of fixed points for any permutation is 1. Some have more. For some to have more, others must have less, and all of those will have 0.
But as a logical matter, "the structural difference is total" is pure gibberish. Consider these two permutations on 5 elements:
1. [2, 3, 4, 5, 1]
2. [5, 1, 2, 3, 4]
"Not a single element occupies the same position in both orderings."
But of course these two permutations have a nearly identical structure (they are rotations in opposite directions, and are each other's inverses); they are far more closely related to each other than either is to
3. [4, 3, 2, 1, 5]
even though permutation 3 shares the assigned position of "3" with permutation 1, and the assigned position of "2" with permutation 2.
Then:
>> We reframe the question:
>> Transform the question "what is the structural distance between two orderings"
>> into the mathematical problem "what is the cycle structure of a specific permutation in S₆₄?"
This is nonsense. The 'question' cannot be transformed into the 'problem', because they are completely unrelated ideas. It's like transforming the question 'what is the Levenshtein distance between two strings?' into the problem 'if a specific string were in alphabetical order, how would it be pronounced?'.
Not as far as I can tell from skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_permutation_statistics.
No.
The exposition has its problems too. Consider:
>> Zero fixed points — not a single hexagram occupies the same position in both orderings. The structural difference is total.
As a mathematical matter, the expected number of fixed points for any permutation is 1. Some have more. For some to have more, others must have less, and all of those will have 0.
But as a logical matter, "the structural difference is total" is pure gibberish. Consider these two permutations on 5 elements:
"Not a single element occupies the same position in both orderings."But of course these two permutations have a nearly identical structure (they are rotations in opposite directions, and are each other's inverses); they are far more closely related to each other than either is to
even though permutation 3 shares the assigned position of "3" with permutation 1, and the assigned position of "2" with permutation 2.Then:
>> We reframe the question:
>> Transform the question "what is the structural distance between two orderings"
>> into the mathematical problem "what is the cycle structure of a specific permutation in S₆₄?"
This is nonsense. The 'question' cannot be transformed into the 'problem', because they are completely unrelated ideas. It's like transforming the question 'what is the Levenshtein distance between two strings?' into the problem 'if a specific string were in alphabetical order, how would it be pronounced?'.