One day, I had lunch with my friend at a local Chinese
resturant. At the end of the meal, we had one last cup of tea and
some fortune cookies. We laughed at our canned fortunes and our
lame attempts to speak the "learn Chinese" phrases to the waitress.
Then I noticed the lucky numbers on the back. I wondered if anyone
ever attempted and won the lottery using those numbers. My friend
said "Forget the lottery, that's for the next cache".
He told me about an ancient Chinese method to divine the future
using 3 coins. He didn't have any change, so I offered 3 quarters
for the demonstration. He had me perform a series of coin tosses
and wrote down the results. "Remember to write down the results
from bottom to top." he said. I didn't want to look foolish if I
got a bad fortune, so I insisted that he divine his future as
well.
He searched a series of lookup tables to determine the results.
Book of changes, trigrams, hexagrams is all I could make out
clearly from the page. He looked up a few items in the tables and
jotted down some cryptic results.
My reading
Lines:
TTH THT THT THT TTT HHH
223 232 232 232 222 333
7 7 7 7 6 9
Trigrams:
--o-- -- --
--x-- -----
----- -----
LI DUI
FIRE SWAMP
----- -----
----- -----
----- -----
QIAN QIAN
HEAVEN HEAVEN
Hexagrams:
14. ||||¦|
DA YOU
Great Possessing
Great Possession
Independence, Freedom
43. |||||¦
GUAI
Parting
Breakthrough
Separation
|
My friend's reading:
Lines:
TTH TTH HTT TTH HTH THH
223 223 322 223 323 233
7 7 7 7 8 8
Trigrams:
-- -- -- --
-- -- -- --
----- -----
ZHEN ZHEN
THUNDER THUNDER
----- -----
----- -----
----- -----
QIAN QIAN
HEAVEN HEAVEN
Hexagrams:
34. ||||¦¦
DA ZUANG
Great Invigorating
Great Power
Great Boldness
|
The oracle interprets my fortune: You now enjoy independence and
freedom and will part ways with bad habits in the future.
"The story of my life" I replied.
The oracle interprets his fortune: You have great strength that
will continue into the future.
"You're just a boring body builder!" I replied.
"So does that mean I'll win the lottery soon?" I asked. "Sounds
like a plan dude" he chuckled. "Hey wait a minute, give me back my
quarters." I demanded.
"I thought I had you there!" he laughed.
"Ok, let's flip for the bill, you call it" I said as I flipped a
coin.
"Heads I win, tails you lose...Tails you lose." he said.
Darn it, I never win at games of chance!
"Hey, I still want my quarters back!" I yelled.
"You're too focused for me dude!" he chuckled as he returned my
quarters.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on
Geochecker.com.
