On Computational Astrology

I started studying Traditional Astrology back in 2006/2007 with Luís Ribeiro and the late Helena Avelar. What drew me to it was that, unlike modern astrology, traditional astrology is built on a well-defined set of rules that naturally catered to my engineering mind. Far from being a modern invention, many of its surviving foundational texts date back to the Hellenistic period or earlier (2nd or 1st century BCE).

Despite this, astrology today has a (mostly well-deserved) bad reputation. Marred by New Age pop culture, vague mysticism, and online charlatans, the discipline is rarely studied with rigor, except in the academic history of science, where it is mostly treated as a historical artifact.

However, I believe there is another valid way forward: an approach at the intersection of computer science and traditional astrology that I call Computational Astrology. Computational Astrology encompasses the development of computational tools, the algorithmic and empirical evaluation of astrological techniques, and their application to practical problem-solving, such as simulating scenarios or building Human-AI decision-support systems. The goal is to do serious research and build useful tools that help people navigate complex decisions while, indirectly, pushing the discipline itself toward greater technical clarity and reproducible work.

I recently put up a minimal site at https://computationalastrology.org to outline the scope of the field, which will be refined over time.