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Chow Chung-yan

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) appears sudden and revolutionary, yet its origins stretch deep into history, revealing a profound and forgotten intellectual exchange between China and the West.
Long before Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, or even Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, there was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – the German polymath born exactly 380 years ago next week. Among his monumental contributions to science is the binary numeral system, which serves as the bedrock of modern computing, AI and even DNA biology.
Leibniz developed a “new” form of mathematics that uses only the digits 0 and 1 while designing a mechanical calculator. However, he struggled to convince his European peers that a two-digit system held any deep significance.
In 1701, a frustrated Leibniz sent a letter describing his binary system to his friend, Father Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit missionary working in Beijing. On reading it, Bouvet immediately recognised that Leibniz’s system perfectly matched the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching (Book of Changes) – arguably China’s oldest classical text, which shaped the core of East Asian civilisations.
Bouvet replied to Leibniz with a woodcut print of the 64 hexagrams, explaining that the Chinese had developed an identical binary system some 3,000 years earlier. Though they used different symbols – broken and unbroken lines instead of 0 and 1 – the underlying conceptual principles were exactly the same.
When Leibniz received the print in 1703, he was both thunderstruck and elated. He quickly penned a second paper on binary code whose title translates as “Explanation of the binary arithmetic, which uses only the characters 1 and 0, with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figure of Fu Xi” – the mythical Chinese sage credited with creating the hexagram system.

Leibniz, who ranks alongside Isaac Newton as a founding father of modern science, became so enthralled by the I Ching that he saw it not just as a precursor to binary code, but as the foundation for a universal language of reasoning, which he called characteristica universalis. As a devout Christian, he had long dreamed of creating a logical language to unlock God’s creation, a concept he termed Creation Ex Nihilo (creation out of nothing). He realised the ancient Chinese shared this profound understanding, capturing it in the phrase: wuji sheng taiji (the ultimate emerges from nothingness).
Yet, despite Leibniz’s tireless promotion, the binary system and I Ching were largely overlooked during his lifetime. The next breakthrough arrived a century and a half later when English mathematician George Boole built on Leibniz’s foundations to create Boolean algebra, proving that logical arguments could be calculated using binary states. Boole’s connection to the I Ching was unclear, but the two systems shared some striking similarities.
In 1936, Shannon used Boolean algebra in his historic Massachusetts Institute of Technology master’s thesis, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits”. Shannon’s work effectively turned abstract logic into the physical blueprint for digital circuits. This synergy, combined with Turing’s concept of universal computing, ushered humanity into the Information Age and, ultimately, the era of AI.

The enduring brilliance of the I Ching lies in that it is not merely a rigid system of binary absolutes. It is fundamentally a book about the transformation of one state into another – hence, the Book of Changes. It describes a dynamic, interdependent reality where every state contains the seed of its opposite. Rather than viewing the universe as static, ancient Chinese thinkers saw it as a continuous flux – a philosophy that Greek thinker Heraclitus would have found entirely familiar.
This world view deeply shaped Chinese strategic thinking. In classical strategy, analysis always balances two components: the static xing (physical shape or form) and the dynamic shi (inherent trends and tendencies). A masterful strategy relies on evaluating how these interdependent elements interact over time.
Beyond binary code, the fingerprints of the I Ching can be found across modern mathematics and science, influencing the development of fuzzy logic, chaos theory and AI models. In 2023, researchers successfully applied the hexagram model as a feature selector for stock market prediction, outperforming standard machine learning algorithms like LSTM, or long short-term memory. Their findings were published in the Journal of Database Management under the title, “Incorporating I Ching into Prediction Task via Data Mining”.
Leibniz was merely the first of many Western giants fascinated by this ancient text. Analytical psychologist Carl Jung, quantum mechanics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann – the father of modern computing – were all deeply influenced by its philosophy.

In fact, some historians of science, such as George Dyson, speculate that von Neumann’s revolutionary stored-program concept (the Von Neumann architecture) was inspired by the I Ching’s permutation-based encoding – the realisation that a finite set of binary symbols could represent an infinite array of complex meanings. They also note that the combination of yin and yang produces 64 hexagrams, that human DNA relies on 64 codons and that modern computer machine language uses 64 opcodes. All operate on the exact same combinatorial principle, suggesting it is not mere coincidence.
This historical intersection shows the connection between Chinese civilisation and the West is far deeper and more intricate than is commonly understood.
Today, amid intense geopolitical and ideological rivalry, China is frequently depicted as the cultural antithesis of the West. This view is profoundly ahistorical. As historian Martin Powers often notes, the intellectual roots of the Western Enlightenment owed an immense debt to Chinese philosophy.
In my next column, I will explore why a statue of Confucius sits atop the American Supreme Court, and how even the Declaration of Independence carries distinct Chinese origins.


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The I Ching, Leibniz and AI: how old China-West links shaped modern science

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The connection between Chinese civilisation and Western scientific thinking is far deeper and more intricate than commonly understood


The connection between Chinese civilisation and Western scientific thinking is far deeper and more intricate than commonly understood.


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The I Ching, Leibniz and AI: how old China-West links shaped modern science

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The connection between Chinese civilisation and Western scientific thinking is far deeper and more intricate than commonly understood

The connection between Chinese civilisation and Western scientific thinking is far deeper and more intricate than commonly understood