@JohnBrady @dwalbert OK, now you both got me confused. Was “The Man in the High Castle” written using I Ching or the sequel (that turned out not to be a sequel after all, and which I am yet to read)?

However it was written, “The Man…” was one of the best literary examples of the forking paths problem, and now I wonder if Dick didn’t have Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” as an inspiration. The best non-fiction treatment is of course Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”.