A medieval paper computer to possibility engine for
I read about Zā’irja, a medieval “combinatorial text generator” device. I can’t accept most of the claims, but one part was making sense for me: a set of terms/words can produce questions I would not ask on my own.
I vibe coded a small web app from this idea. The following app combines a problem, a way to act, a constraint, a new point of view, and most importantly human goal.
Explore the project: https://hasantayyar.net/assets/possibility-engine/
I was reading “Scrambling T-R-U-T-H Rotating Letters as a Material Form of Thought” by David Link.
I stumbled upon that article while reading about Ramon Llull’s combinatorial machines.
From there jumped to the Zā’irja, another paper device/machine. Historians accept that Llull was heavily and directly inspired by the Ibn Khaldun’s Zā’irja**. Ramon Llull was living in Majorca and learned Arabic. He was exposed to Islamic science, astrology, and mechanics.
Zā’irja is also a paper machine, a paper computational machine, like Llull’s machine. It’s widely analyzed and demystified by Ibn Khaldun. The device originated in the Islamic West (Maghreb / Al-Andalus) around the late 12th century—roughly 200 years before Ibn Khaldun wrote about it. The Zā’irja was many years, like nowadays numerology, used by magic charlatans and misunderstood. Ibn Khaldun completed the first draft of his work/book Muqaddimah (The Introduction) in 1377 CE. And he mentioned about Zā’irja in his work widely. Although it’s mostly very poetic and not to the point. He wrote it while he he was in self-imposed isolation at the castle of Qal’at Ibn Salama, nowadays Algeria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah
Zā’irja operates like an analog computer or a systematic ideation tool designed to generate answers to complex questions.
How It Worked
- Input: You input a clear question written in Arabic.
- Breakdown: The letters of the question are converted into numbers using traditional letter-number systems (Abjad numerology).
- Processing: The data is run through dynamic, concentric circles containing astronomical, cosmological, and mathematical rules.
- Output: The machine rearranges the elements to produce a poetic or insightful answer.