Hacker News Reader

People have known about this since the Shang dynasty so yes it has been noticed before.

If you find this interesting, I suggest you study group theory - this seems pretty much a direct consequence of the group structure.

View on HN

I doubt they already had the King Wen order in the Shang dynasty. Manuscripts dated to as late as the Han dynasty have a totally different hexagram order. In any case traditionally the divination book for Shang is considered to be the Guicang, not the I Ching (=Zhouyi = Changes of Zhou), which according to tradition put kun before qian.

The Shang dynasty people knew the pairing structure of hexagrams (inverted/complementary pairs), but cycle decomposition is a modern group theory tool that did not exist until the 19th century. These are two different levels of analysis.

They knew about the cycle. That's why it's called the King Wen sequence right? Not sure what part of this you think people didn't know about so we may be talking at cross purposes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com