The computer-generated personality analysis

Most of the written personality analyses in circulation today were written by no one. A program calculates the birth chart and assembles the text out of ready-made blocks. That is not a flaw. It is simply worth knowing how such a booklet comes about, because that settles what can be expected of it.

How the text is put together

For every position the calculation yields, the program holds a block of text: Sun in sign, Sun in house, Moon in sign, Moon in house, and the angles between the factors. The program checks which configurations occur in your chart, fetches the matching paragraphs and strings them together. A few hundred blocks are enough for no two booklets ever to come out the same.

Two things follow at once. First, each paragraph stands on its own: it was written without its author knowing the rest of the positions in your chart. Second, the sequence in the booklet is an arrangement, not a ranking. What comes first is not the most important thing, but the thing the calculation reaches first.

What the stars measure

Many programs put a number of stars after each aspect, usually one to five. As a rule what is measured is how exact the angle turns out to be: an aspect that is right to within half a degree gets more than one that falls six degrees wide; some programs also take into account which planets are involved.

The number is therefore a measure of how tight a single configuration is, not of its weight in your life. For sorting within the booklet it is useful. For comparing two people it is not, and it says nothing about whether a theme is live for you at the moment.

What a program cannot do

• It does not know your situation. The same paragraph goes to a girl of seventeen and to a man of sixty.
• It does not notice when the time of birth is uncertain. It works with whatever was typed in and turns out the chapters on the houses just as confidently as everything else — although those are the shakiest of all when the birth time has been rounded, because all twelve shift with the ascendant.
• It does not sum up. At the end there is no sentence about where the whole thing tends, because that would take a block that knew all the others, and there is none.
• It does not answer. Being able to ask a question back is the real difference from a conversation.

These are not faults in the proper sense but the way the thing is built: a block can only know what is written in the block itself.

How to tell a booklet came from a machine

It is seldom stated. The text gives it away all the same.

• The headings name positions instead of themes: “Mars in the sixth house”, not “Work and trouble”.
• Every position gets roughly the same amount of space — including the one that barely counts in your chart.
• Two paragraphs claim the opposite of each other, and neither of them mentions the other.

None of these marks makes a booklet worthless. They only mark where it stops. A program delivers the complete list of everything a birth chart contains, with no gaps and no preferences — no one manages that. What it does not deliver is the decision as to which three of those points mean something to you just now. That stays open, whether you make it yourself or put the question to someone else. How the individual factors are calculated and what they describe is set out under horoscopes.