WHAT USE IS IFA TODAY?

According to Wole Soyinka (the only Nobel Laureate of literature in Africa), "it is a very curious phenomenon that Yoruba scholars are reluctant to come to terms with IFA. Even when they are trying to be somewhat objective about IFA, they are totally incapable of relating to it. They say it is a contemporary world. What use is IFA today?"

You can only ask "what use is IFA today" if you think IFA is merely a literary corpus of ancient verses, parables and anecdotes. However, there is more to IFA than a repository of literary corpus. IFA is high-science!

If African youths had not abandoned IFA for religious superstitions, they would have taken computer science to another level. For example, there are 16 principal Odu IFA elements, and these 16 IFA elements can further be extended to 65,535, and in some cases infinitely. Similarly, a CD uses 16 bits per sample. That gives each sample a range from 0 - 65,535. Coincidence?

There have been talks about computers running out of data storage space. This will never happen because the Odu IFA elements (i.e. patterns of binary code upon which computers operate) can be extended infinitely. So, if Odu IFA elements can be fractalized infinitely; certainly, computer-memory RAM can be extended infinitely.

FROM ABACUS TO MODERN COMPUTER - there is nothing new under the sun

Before the advent of electronic calculators, and certainly before the advent of modern computers, there was Abacus. Abacus is a simple calculator made from beads and wires, widely used by merchants and traders in Asia and Africa. The history of Abacus stretches back more than 2500 years; in fact, Abacus remained the fastest form of calculator until the 17^th Century.

The Abacus

Nearly every ancient civilization had its own Abacus counting frame. The use of Abacus in ancient Egypt was mentioned by the Greek historian Herotodus, who said that the Egyptians manipulated the pebbles from right to left.

In the West, Leonardo da Vinci was probably the first person to attempt to design an Abacus machine (Circa. 1452-1519). However, Gottfried Liebniz was the first person to attempt to use the Abacus machine for binary calculations; turning the machine into a rudimentary logic gate. (Circa. 1646-1716). In his book “Liebniz and China,” Franklin Perkins expressed to his readers how fascinated Liebniz was with the African and the Chinese I Ching binary geomancy (i.e., Ifa) that he obsessively pleaded with the absolute ruler of France, Louis XIV of France, to invade Egypt, having realized that the knowledge of binary geomancy was salient to executing all four basic mathematical operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing) on his Abacus machine. It was said that Napoleon’s failed invasion of Egypt in 1798 was a late implementation of Leibniz’s plan.

It would take almost another 300 years for early computer scientists to fully understand how Liebniz’s Abacus machine works, and how it could be adapted into a modern computing system we are now familiar with today.

Computers truly came into their own as a great invention of the 20^th Century, but they are essentially a modern day Abacus machine – there is nothing new under the sun.