Friday 30 June 2023

Odù Ifá and ASCII Codes - What is the uniqueness of 256? Coincidence?

My previous post shows how to map Odù Ifá signature to binary digits and from binary digits to decimal.

Since we humans mostly write in words (letters, emails, text messages etc), how do we convert these numbers to alphabetic characters?

In the early days of computing, computers could only crunch numbers. When people got fed up with just crunching numbers, they started looking for ways of representing alphabetic chraracters with numbers.

In 1960 the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character encoding standard was developed by the Americans to map the English alphabetic characters to numbers. The current ASCII standards map all the printable and non-printable characters on your keyboard to numbers (since computers only understand "1" and "0"). This is where it gets interesting... The ASCII uses 256 binary digits just like Odu Ifa! Probably the Americans got their inspiration from Ọ̀rúnmìlà... Who knows?

What this mean is that every Odù Ifá sign maps to every key on your keyboard and more!

See the attached graphic for ASCII codes that map decimals to symbols. 

Below are few examples (Note: Odù are read from right to left)... (Symbol == Decimal == Binary == Odù Ifá).

Lowercase characters: 

a == 97 == 01100001 == Ògúndá-Èdí

b == 98 == 01100010 == Ìrẹtẹ̀-Èdi

c == 99 == 01100011 == Ìrosùn-Èdí

d == 100 == 01100100 == Òtúra-Èdí

e == 101 == 01100101 == Ọ̀sẹ́-Èdí

Uppercase characters: 

A == 65 == 01000001 == Ògúndá-Òtúra

B == 66 == 01000010 == Ìrẹtẹ̀-Òtúra

C == 67 == 01000011 == Ìrosùn-Òtúra

D == 68 == 01000100 == Òtúrá Méjì

E == 69 == 01000101 == Ọ̀sẹ́-Òtúra

Numerals:

0 == 48 == 00110000 == Ogbè-Ìrosùn

1 == 49 == 00110001 == Ògúndá-Ìrosùn

2 == 50 == 00110010 == Ìrẹtẹ̀-Ìrosùn

3 == 51 == 00110011 == Ìrosùn Méjì

4 == 52 == 00110100 == Òtúra-Ìrosùn

5 == 53 == 00110101 == Ọ̀sẹ́-Ìrosùn

For all the ASCII codes (decimal, octal, hexadecimal, binary and symbol) see: http://www.ascii-code.com

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