Elements: count, model and support

Picture your pantry. You can count the jars on the shelf, or you can put each one on the scale. Counting tells you what's there. Weighing tells you how much. The Elements block on the Chart tab does both, with a switch at the top: Count and Model.

Count

Count is the simple version. It takes the characters you can see in your pillars and sorts them into Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. With all four pillars that's eight characters. Without a birth time it's six.

Each element gets a bar and a number. Under some bars there's a small note:

• Also hidden in a branch: the element appears inside that branch too, as a hidden stem.
• 0 visible, hidden in a branch: you can't see it at first glance, but it's there inside.
• Not present: it isn't in the birth chart at all, visible or hidden.

None of these is a verdict. An element that's missing in the chart often arrives with a year or a decade.

Model

Model weighs the elements instead of counting them. It's a choice the app made, and it's labeled that way. Here's how it works:

• Each visible stem counts 1.
• Each branch also counts 1, shared among its hidden stems. The Tiger (寅), for example, holds mostly Wood, some Fire and a little Earth.
• The Month branch counts one and a half times, because it's the season you were born in.

The numbers come with two decimals, so you can see the small amounts too. The Model switch only appears when the chart was calculated from a birth date, and not when the possible versions of the chart disagree. On the page of another person in your list you see Count only.

Support for your core element

Below the bars in Model, a gauge goes from Less support to More support. It adds the weight of your own element and the element that feeds it, and divides by the total. Think of it as how much backing your Day Master has around it in the chart.

• Under 0.40, the model reads less support.
• Over 0.60, more support.
• In between, the chart is balanced, and the model rates it with its classical useful element.

A sentence then says which elements the model reads as more aligned for you, and which as the most demanding. When the chart is balanced, it names its useful element and how it was chosen: by the season (調候), as the mediator (通關) or by the month's structure (格局).

Tap Why? to see your own numbers: your core element, the one that feeds it, and your ratio.

What it's for, and what it isn't

This model is what the app uses for the rating pips with the App model label, like the one on Today. When the possible versions of a chart disagree, Today rates it with the most likely version and says so. A chart from pasted pillars, with no birth date, shows Not rated, never a made-up middle score.

The gauge is not the tradition's strength verdict. The caption under it says so: Not a traditional strength verdict. Classical schools judge strength in their own, more detailed ways, and they don't always agree. The full reading has the traditional view in its own section.

So use the bars the way you'd use the pantry list: to see what's plentiful, what's scarce, and what might be worth adding. Not to decide whether a chart is good or bad. There's no such thing.