I came across with horoscope thingy when i was in secondary school, which try to divide or classify human beings to several groups. For example, Western horoscope divides people based on their birthday to groups, such as Aries, Cancer and etc, and try to assign some character to each of it. For example, Cancer are protective people. Some people further use that to predict their daily/monthly/yearly luck. Chinese also have their own horoscope, which is based on their year of birth, for example, rats, rabbits, horse and etc. Similar to Western horoscope, it assigns some character to each horoscope, for example, people born in the year of Horse are generally wild, and like freedom. I personnelly try to view the assigment of human character to each horoscope as a mapping from date of birth to some qualitative or quantitative values. And, it seem to be something similar to production rule or more known as "If-Then rules", with the example above, " If Horoscope is horse, Then characteristic is Freedom, and wild". Perhaps we can create an expert system for this.
And, when i was in Penang, during my Master study, i read about chinese weight calculation method, which actually try to give everyone a birth weight based on the time/date of birth in " Jing and Liang" ( noted that Jing and Liang are actually measurement unit for weight for chinese people). The weight, in "jing and Liang", will then be used to predict someone life. People with "high weight" will have a better life and so on. Weight is basically calculated based on addition of weight associated to each factor, such as year of birth, month of first, day of birth, and time of birth in mandarin calender. To some extend, is an equation that take several inputs and produce a numerical score as output. It seem to be like an not so complicated mathematical modeling.
Horoscope's prediction some how still occured in my life. Either my mom will buy a "chinese prediction book" before chinese new year, or some how, someone will discuss this topic with me. I personally is not an expert in horoscope. But, I have tried to view horoscope as a mathematical model, perhaps becauses my research is on modeling. And i have actually shared my views with some of my friends, colleage, and a Manager in Motorola, Penang. To my best knowledge, in statictic, prediction has to be based another factor(s) that have correlation or causation. As example, rate of car accident will be higher when raining. So, rain fall rate can be a causation factor to car accident. And during raining, people will buy umbrella, so, eventually, selling of umbrella will correlate to car accident rate, and this is called correlation.
If westen Horoscope prediction is true, it is possible for us to assume that a person life will correlate to his/her date of birth. It means that a person month of birth will correlate to his/her characteristic, future life and so on. If Chinese Horoscope is true, is it mean that year of birth will correlate to some one characteritic, and etc? The same is applied to Chinese wight calculation methods, which also consider someone date and time of birth. If that true, a person date and time of birth is actually correlate to a person future. Wow..... Is that true?
This is the first time i use technical writing skills that i learn before to write blog. I hope that my research supervisor have no chance to see this.
regards
