March 23, 2026
Hexagrams, hot takes
Show HN: The King Wen Permutation: [52, 10, 2]
Ancient I Ching math find sparks ‘cool!’ vs ‘meh, random’ brawl
TLDR: A coder mapped two orders of the I Ching and found most of the 64 symbols fall into one giant loop, with no symbol staying put. Commenters split between delight and dismissals—“random shuffles do that”—with side banter about Wolfenstein 3D tricks and overhyped AI demos.
A coder poking at the 3,000‑year‑old I Ching says they found a hidden pattern: when you map two ways of ordering its 64 symbols, most of them sit in one giant loop, with none staying put. Translation: imagine shuffling a deck so that following the arrows sends you around a few closed circles—one of them swallowing 81% of the cards. Nerdy? Yes. But on the thread, the math wasn’t the drama—the comments were.
The discoverer arrives wide‑eyed and invites everyone to verify it in the browser. Immediately, the mood splits. One camp cheers a cool discovery in ancient wisdom; another camp rolls its eyes. A top skeptic grumbles we’re in an age where something that’s “maybe one sentence on Wikipedia” gets turned into AI‑polished spectacle, calling the grandeur overdone. A pragmatist shrugs: “random shuffles usually have a big loop,” basically saying the surprise isn’t surprising.
Then the comic relief: someone asks if “cycle” is like John Carmack’s retro trick in Wolfenstein 3D to fill the screen with red pixels without repeats. Another wonders how this stacks up to magic squares. The vibe: mystical math meets gamer nostalgia, with half the crowd lighting incense and the other half shouting, “It’s just probability!” Either way, the I Ching just got a 2026 meme makeover.
Key Points
- •The 64 I Ching hexagrams have two canonical orderings: binary natural order (0–63) and the King Wen sequence (~1000 BCE).
- •Mapping the binary order to the King Wen order defines a permutation in the symmetric group S64.
- •The cycle decomposition of this permutation is [52, 10, 2], with no fixed points.
- •81% of hexagrams lie in a single long cycle (length 52).
- •The article claims this specific cycle structure has not been previously reported in the literature.