Discussion
The King Wen Permutation
gezhengwen: 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?
dmos62: Fascinating. I've barely any knowledge of I Ching. What motivated you to explore this and I Ching in general?
chordbug: 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.
Bimos: Sorry, do you have Chinese version? :)
thaumasiotes: > and is the result even that surprising?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: 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?'.
gezhengwen: 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.
casey2: Random shuffles usually have big loops
gezhengwen: You are right, the presentation may be overdone. The result itself is a small mathematical fact. I made the interactive page so people can verify it themselves, not to make it look grand. Thank you for the criticism, I will adjust.
gezhengwen: You are right, the expected largest cycle of a random permutation is around 40. 52 is larger but not extreme. I did not claim this result is statistically significant.
gezhengwen: You are right, zero fixed points does not mean total structural difference. Your counterexample is good. My wording was wrong, I will fix it. What interests me is not the statistical rarity, but that 81% of elements are in one orbit — this means the reordering is highly coupled, not a bunch of small local swaps.
busfahrer: Does cycle here mean the same thing as what Carmack used in Wolf3D to randomly fill the screen with red pixels without any of them repeating?
