ABSTRACT

How from the I Ching to the Internet era a wealth of codes have been developed for expressing information in many forms.

Throughout history, oracles have been consulted to obtain advice on important decisions, even in everyday life. The most ancient answers were binary, limited to “yes” and “no”; as in the I Ching, the Book of Changes, one of the oldest Chinese texts. Answers were represented by horizontal lines, a solid line for yes and a broken line for no.