Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Mark Kolmar <>]

On 3/27/2022 7:46 AM, Andrew Culver wrote:
> I am no mathematician, but using the changing hex if it differs from 
> the original definitely adds a real twist to the probabilities. This 
> is not just pseudorandom numbers 1-64.

Is this to say when a hexagram has changing lines, both the original and 
the changed hexagrams would be present in the output?

In the 3-coin method, lines change in either direction with the same 
probability. Yarrow stalk method, statistically, would have triple the 
number of Old Yang --o-- as Old Yin --x--. Some changes are more likely 
than others in that case.

But I was also trying to ask, how much did the changed lines inform 
compositional decisions? In the divination process, those lines of text 
would be read. Was the fact of a changing line used, beyond its role in 
the sequence of hexagrams?

> Speaking of pseudorandom, my C code does not just call a standard lib 
> rand function and take the output as is. It uses a complex method of 
> stacking and shuffling decks of pseudorandom numbers that I stumbled 
> across in the early 80’s.

Around the same time, as a high school student, a group of us found / 
figured out how to get pseudorandom numbers using a buffer. You might be 
describing a similar process. For anyone who was not around, PCs of the 
time did not process floating point numbers in the modern sense. The 
function, essentially, took a bunch of byte values (integers), and added 
them or blended them bit-wise. The result was stuffed into the start of 
the buffer. Today, you wouldn't want your banking transactions secured 
on that basis, but it worked quite well enough to generate a star-field, 
maze, or movements of a video game monster.

--Mark