The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) seems sudden and revolutionary, but its roots are deep in history, revealing deep and forgotten intellectual exchanges between China and the West.
Long before Alan TuringClaude Shannon, or even Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, there was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – a German polymath who was born exactly 380 years ago next week. Among his major contributions to science is the binary number system, which serves as the basis for modern computing, AI and even DNA biology.
Leibniz invented a “new” form of mathematics that uses only the digits 0 and 1 while inventing the mechanical calculator. However, he struggled to convince his European colleagues that the two-digit system had any deep significance.
In 1701, a confused Leibniz sent a letter explaining his binary system to his friend, Father Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit missionary working in Beijing. Upon reading it, Bouvet immediately realized that Leibniz’s system corresponded perfectly with the 64 hexagrams of I Ching (Book of Changes) – undoubtedly the oldest Chinese text, which formed the core of East Asian civilization.
Bouvet responded to Leibniz with a woodcut print 64 hexagramsexplaining that the Chinese had developed a similar binary system some 3,000 years earlier. Although they used different symbols – broken and solid lines instead of 0 and 1 – the basic principles of the concept were exactly the same.
When Leibniz received the print in 1703, he was thunderstruck and delighted. He quickly wrote a second paper on binary code whose title translates as “An explanation of binary arithmetic, which uses only the characters 1 and 0, with some comments on its usefulness, and with the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figure of Fu Xi” – mythical Chinese sage credit for creating the hexagram system.
