Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with making a Chinese zodiac calendar. You know, like, figure out the animal sign for any given year. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, it turned out to be a bit more involved than I initially thought!
Getting Started
First, I needed to, you know, actually understand the cycle. I remembered there were 12 animals, and I had a vague idea of the order. So I went online and grabbed a list to make sure I had it right:
- Rat
- Ox
- Tiger
- Rabbit
- Dragon
- Snake
- Horse
- Goat
- Monkey
- Rooster
- Dog
- Pig
Okay, cool. Animals sorted. Now, how to link them to years?
Figuring Out the Logic
This is where it got a little tricky. It’s not like the cycle starts in the year 0, right? It’s some ancient system. So I did some more digging. I found out that the cycle repeats every 12 years, and I needed a reference point. I found one year that I already known that the year of Rat is 1924.
I thought, “Okay, if I know 1924 is a Rat year, I can use math!” I figured I could take any year, subtract 1924, and then use the remainder after dividing by 12 to find the animal. It’s like a clock, right? Every 12 hours, it starts over.
Putting It Together
I decided to use a simple method, I mod the given year with 12 to match the animal. So if the remainder is 0 mean it’s Rat, 1 is Ox, so on…
The Result!
And there you have it! By using some basic, and looking up the order of the zodiac animals, you can easily find the animal to the given year. Pretty neat, huh?
