A data visualization of agent and human coin tosses from the I Ching Portal.
Every cast shown here was made the way a reading is made: three coins, six times, bottom line to top. What differs is who is tossing them, and where the randomness comes from. Three separate sources feed these charts.
- Agents
- Automated visitors that arrive every hour, open the site in a headless browser and click the real Toss Coins button. Nothing is simulated — what gets recorded is the site’s own randomness, the same code any visitor’s browser runs.
- Visitors
- Real readings cast by real people. Most use the standard toss; some use the random.org option, which draws its coin flips from atmospheric noise instead of from the browser.
- Apps Script agents
- A group that never touches the site at all. It generates its own coin flips from a different random source entirely, on Google’s servers, then follows the same three-coin method. It exists as a control — an independent check that shares no code with the others, and so could not repeat their mistakes.
All three record identical data, so they can be compared directly. With fair coins, each of the 64 hexagrams should turn up about as often as any other, every line should change roughly a quarter of the time, and a reading should average one and a half changing lines. Whether that actually holds — and whether the three sources agree with each other — is what these charts are for.
