B3 / S23 · Binary worlds
Conway's Game of Life
Play a B3/S23 Life board, then trace binary cells through 8 neighborhoods, 64 hexagrams, 256 rules, and Leibniz's I Ching bridge.
What connects the systems is not interpretation, but combination: two states are enough to grow complexity.
The common code underneath
Conway's cells are dead 0 or alive 1; every hexagram line is yin or yang. They are not the same system of thought, but each position begins with two possibilities and carries one bit of information.
From 8 to 64, then 256
An elementary cellular automaton reads three binary inputs—left, self, and right—so it has 2³ = 8 local neighborhoods, which can be paired formally with eight three-line trigram states.
Two trigrams combine as 8 × 8 into 2⁶ = 64 six-line states. A rule table assigns 0 or 1 to each of eight neighborhoods, producing 2⁸ = 256 Elementary Rules. The systems share combinatorics, but they are not the same automaton.
Leibniz's historical bridge
The binary system came first; the cross-cultural recognition came later. Bouvet sent Leibniz the Fuxi hexagram diagram associated with Shao Yong. With yin = 0, yang = 1, and a particular reading direction, its 64 combinations can be read as 0–63. Leibniz published the connection in his 1703 Explanation of Binary Arithmetic.
This shows that two symbolic systems can share a binary structure—not that the I Ching predicted computers, or that the standard King Wen sequence is a 0–63 count.