Here we consider how and why to bootstrap Hoon to the I Ching.
Background
Urbit is usable thanks to many supplementary communication platforms, some of them by now threaded into the network, others (like gather.town) help us organize the teams and conditions for many people to work on one thing.
A substantially evolved system of servers known as Federated Wiki looks at how people choose to make commitments to one or another version of a thing. Here, each Internal Hyperlink is a commit using the mechanism of pagination. Using the notebook is sort of like playing a card game in which there is a limited deck of cards
We test drive a new wiki to reflect on how a small group Hackathon could be organized through different approaches to the I Ching.
Rationale
Homoiconicity between the I Ching, Nock and Federated Wiki. See Lineup Diagram for Great Chi in action.
Groups lets you publish and submit in discussion mode and thread mode but does not have features that let us collaborate in a research oriented way. We will exploit homoiconicity in Federated Wiki to model a random number generator that can be used to scry a user-generated library of 64 patterns each made of six lines some broken, some unbroken.
Patterns
So Saru Game explores a coin flip mechanism that could be combined with a turn generator similar to something used in early multi-user dungeon games. We arrive at these conclusions observing how hard it is to make all six sides show their faces.
Speed Bot maps random paths through a Grid Template mapped to Urbit syllables
Book of Changes shows you things you can scrye.
Recent Changes lets you look at the library these changes were built on top of.
Lineup Diagram shows you where you've been.
DOT strict digraph rankdir=LR node [style=filled shape=hexagon fillcolor=lightgrey penwidth=2 color=green fontname="Verdana"] HERE NODE node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] WHERE /^Links:/ LINKS HERE -> NODE HERE NODE node [style=filled fillcolor=aliceblue penwidth=1 color=black] edge [dir=both] WHERE /^Jumps:/ LINKS NODE -> HERE node [style="filled,rounded,dotted" fillcolor=white] edge [style=dotted dir=back] HERE NODE BACKLINKS NODE -> HERE STATIC strict digraph {rankdir=LR node [style=filled shape=hexagon fillcolor=lightgrey penwidth=2 color=green fontname="Script"] "Book of Change Template" node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] "Book of Change Template" node [style=filled fillcolor=aliceblue penwidth=1 color=black] edge [dir=both] node [style="filled,rounded,dotted" fillcolor=white] edge [style=dotted dir=back] "Book of Change Template" "Welcome Visitors" -> "Book of Change Template"}
The Code plugin formats the author site owner's typed computer code in and understandable, human readable, way.
The Method plugin keeps a running tally of calculations expressed as a series of lines.
This calculator showed the feasibility of numerical calculations expressed in an alternate markup. Its derived from an earlier awk script now in coffeescript. github 