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Methodology

How the engine judges a graha

Tapping a planet or a house gives a score out of 100 and a band from Excellent to Afflicted. This page sets out every input behind that number, what each one is worth, and where it comes from. Nothing here is a black box: the app prints the same arithmetic beside the score, and if you disagree with a weight you can see exactly which line to argue with.

What the score claims — and what it does not

It says how well placed a graha or bhava is by the criteria the classical texts themselves use. It is a synthesis of measures that are already arithmetic — Shadbala is a numeric system in Parashara, Ashtakavarga is a count of bindus, dignity is a table.

It is not a prediction, and it carries no claim that a high score produces good events or a low one produces bad. We tested the dated, predictive form of this tradition against 111 charts and 866 recorded events and found it performed about as well as marking the same number of periods at random. That result is published in full on the method page Judgement and it has not been quietly set aside here.

The twenty-five inputs

Every graha starts at a neutral 50. Each measure below moves it up or down by a fixed amount, and every step is shown in the app beside the result. The ranges are the maximum the measure can move the score in either direction.

Measure	What it reads	Range	Source
Shadbala	The graha's own total strength against the minimum its class requires. Carries the most weight because it is the tradition's own strength system, not ours.	±24	Parashara, Shadbala adhyaya
Dignity	Nine levels, by the classical sequence: exalted, moolatrikona, own, great friend, friend, neutral, enemy, great enemy, debilitated. Exaltation and debilitation run through the whole sign — the degree in the tables is the paramocccha, the point of deepest exaltation, not a boundary — and being within a degree of it adjusts the score again. The relationship to the dispositor is the panchadha maitri, natural friendship compounded with temporal, not the natural table alone.	+21 / −19	Parashara; naisargika-tatkalika maitri
Ashtakavarga	The graha's own bindus in the sign it occupies, out of eight.	±12	Bhinnashtakavarga
Avastha	Baladi state — infant, youth, adolescent, old, dead — from the degree within the sign.	+6 / −8	Baladi avastha
Bhava type	Trikona, kendra, upachaya, dusthana. The upachaya rule is applied: a malefic in 3, 6, 10 or 11 gains where a benefic does not.	+8 / −9	Parashari house classes
Functional nature	Which houses the graha rules from this lagna. Yogakaraka where it holds both a kendra and a trikona. Kendradhipati dosha applied to natural benefics ruling angles.	+15 / −18	Parashari lordship
Nakshatra lord	Whether the asterism it stands in is ruled by itself, a friend, a neutral or an enemy.	+8 / −6	Naisargika maitri
Drishti received	Every graha aspecting the sign, weighted three ways: by benefic or malefic nature, by friendship with what it is looking at, and by its own dignity. An exalted Saturn does not damage what it sees the way a fallen one does — the glance of a dignified malefic costs about a third of a debilitated one's.	±10	Graha drishti, incl. special aspects
Association	Who shares the sign, weighted the same two ways.	±10	Yuti
Combustion	Three states, not one. Cazimi within about 17 arc-minutes is read as strengthened; deep combustion within a third of the orb is the harshest; ordinary combustion sits between.	+8 / −16	Astangata, orbs per graha
Retrogradation	Cheshta bala rises. Worth more to a debilitated graha, where retrogradation is a ground for Neecha Bhanga.	+4 / +9	Cheshta bala; Neecha Bhanga
Papakartari	Hemmed between malefics on either side. The benefic form is credited too.	±7	Kartari yoga
Yogas	Named combinations the graha participates in, read from the same scan the Yogas panel uses.	+12	As listed in the app
Doshas	Named afflictions the graha is party to — Manglik, Kaal Sarp, Guru Chandal, Shrapit, Grahan, Pitra, Kemadruma — matched to the grahas each one actually involves. Counted as a condition the graha stands in, not as background, so it sits in tier 3 with combustion and war.	−16	As listed in the app
Planetary war	Two star-planets within a degree. Flagged for both; no winner is awarded — see the disagreements below.	−7	Graha yuddha
Parivartana	Mutual sign exchange, graded by the houses involved: Maha, Khala, Dainya.	+11 / −8	Parivartana yoga
Natural karaka	What the graha signifies regardless of lordship. Karako bhava nashaya applied where it stands in the bhava it signifies.	−6	Naisargika karaka
Digbala	Directional strength — Jupiter and Mercury in the 1st, Sun and Mars in the 10th, Saturn in the 7th, Moon and Venus in the 4th. Credited in its own right only while Shadbala is absent, since Shadbala already contains it.	+7 / −5	Dig bala
Neecha Bhanga	Cancellation of debilitation on any of the classical grounds: the dispositor in a kendra, the lord of the exaltation sign in a kendra, retrogradation, or the dispositor sitting with it. Each ground counts.	+14	Neecha bhanga raja yoga
Bhava sandhi	Within two degrees of a house junction, where a graha gives little of either house.	−5	Bhava sandhi
Dispositor’s aspect	The lord of the sign a graha stands in looking back at it.	+5	Parashari drishti
Vargottama	Same sign in rasi and navamsa.	+6	Vargottama
Navamsa dignity	Whether the graha gains or loses dignity in the D-9.	±4	Navamsa

A measure that has not arrived is declared and excluded rather than scored as average. Shadbala is fetched from the engine after the chart draws, so for a moment the panel will say so rather than quietly assuming a middling value.

Priority: what outranks what

Purely additive scoring let context outvote substance — five minor favourable notes could carry a debilitated, powerless graha past one that was merely unremarkable. The texts do not weigh these alike, so the inputs sit in four tiers, consulted in the order the tradition consults them. The tier is printed beside every line in the app.

Tier	What it covers	Inputs	Capped
1	Substance — what the graha is	Shadbala, dignity, functional nature	no
2	Standing — where it sits, and whether the divisions agree	Bhava class, ashtakavarga, navamsa, vargottama	no
3	Condition — states it happens to be in	Combustion, retrogradation, planetary war, parivartana, kartari, doshas	±14
4	Context — everything around it	Drishti, association, nakshatra lord, avastha, yogas, karaka	±16

Beyond the caps there is a dominance rule: tiers 3 and 4 together may not move the score by more than tiers 1 and 2 already have, plus a small allowance. Context can colour a verdict; it cannot reverse one. A debilitated graha at the bottom of the Shadbala table stays weak however many minor favourable notes surround it — and a strong one stays strong.

The six bands

These are not set by eye. Every graha in 1,200 randomly generated charts — 10,800 placements — was scored, and the thresholds are the measured percentiles of that distribution. The share column is what each band actually takes of the sample.

Score	Band	Share	Reading
82+	Excellent	5%	Top twentieth of placements. Strong on the numeric measures and supported by placement and lordship together.
71–81	Very good	11%	Clearly favourable, usually with one measure short of the rest.
61–70	Good	20%	Meaningfully above average.
48–60	Moderate	34%	Mixed, or too little either way to distinguish. The largest band, and where an unremarkable placement belongs.
36–47	Weak	22%	Several measures against it.
0–35	Afflicted	9%	Weak on the numeric measures and afflicted by placement or aspect as well.

The first version of this scale put half of every chart into Good or better, which is the same as saying nothing: readers reported that almost every planet came back Good or Excellent. The fault was not the arithmetic but the thresholds, which had been chosen by intuition rather than measured. Calibrating them against the distribution is what makes Excellent mean something — it is now the top twentieth of placements, not a description of the average one.

The arithmetic

What follows is the model written out. It is here so the result can be reproduced by hand, and so a disagreement can be aimed at a specific term rather than at the output.

The scoring function

A graha begins at a neutral 50. Each measure m contributes a signed weight w_m, and every measure belongs to exactly one of four tiers. Writing T_k for the sum of tier k:

T_k = Σ w_m for all m in tier k C = clamp(T₃, ±14) + clamp(T₄, ±16) A = |T₁ + T₂| + 10 C′ = C · min(1, A / |C|) score = clamp( round(50 + T₁ + T₂ + C′), 0, 100 )

The third line is the dominance rule. A is the allowance: condition and context together may move the score by no more than substance and standing already have, plus ten. When they try to, they are scaled back proportionally rather than truncated, so their internal balance is preserved — a graha with two afflictions and one favourable note keeps that ratio even after the cap bites.

Two consequences worth being explicit about. Tiers 1 and 2 are never capped, so dignity and Shadbala can move the score without limit within the 0–100 bound. And because A depends on |T₁+T₂| rather than on its sign, context is held equally in check whether it is arguing for the graha or against it.

Panchadha maitri as a lattice

Natural friendship n ∈ {−1, 0, +1} comes from Parashara's fixed table. Temporal friendship t ∈ {−1, +1} is read from the chart: counting signs from the graha, positions 2, 3, 4, 10, 11 and 12 hold temporal friends, the rest temporal enemies. The compound is their sum:

p = n + t, p ∈ {−2, −1, 0, +1, +2}

which yields exactly the five classical grades — adhi shatru, shatru, sama, mitra, adhi mitra. That the naive sum reproduces the traditional five-fold table is not a coincidence: the table is that sum, written out longhand.

Dignity, in precedence order

Dignity is not a blend. The first condition that holds decides it, and the order is the classical one:

if sign = uccha sign → exalted (+18) if sign = uccha + 6 → debilitated (−16) if sign = MT sign and deg ∈ MT range → moolatrikona (+14) if sign ∈ own signs → svakshetra (+12) otherwise by p against the dispositor → +9 … −12

Exaltation and debilitation run through the entire sign. The degree in the tables — Sun 10° Aries, Moon 3° Taurus, and so on — is the paramocccha, the point of deepest exaltation, not a boundary. Sitting within a degree of it adjusts the score by a further ±3, reported on its own line.

Combustion as a piecewise function

Let σ be the angular separation from the Sun and r the graha's orb — 12° for the Moon, 17° Mars, 14° Mercury, 11° Jupiter, 10° Venus, 15° Saturn, with 12° and 8° for a retrograde Mercury and Venus.

σ ≤ 0°17′ → cazimi (+8) σ ≤ r ⁄ 3 → deep combustion (−16) σ < r → combustion (−8) σ ≥ r → unaffected ( 0)

The sign change at the first threshold is deliberate and is the tradition's, not ours: a graha in the Sun's heart is read as strengthened, not burnt.

Calibration

Band thresholds were not chosen. Nine grahas were scored in each of 1,200 randomly generated charts — 10,800 placements — and the cutoffs are the measured percentiles of that distribution.

Statistic	Value	Note
Sample	10,800	9 grahas × 1,200 charts, uniform random longitudes and ascendant
Mean	55.3	Above the nominal neutral of 50 — the classical rules favour more placements than they penalise
Median	55	Distribution is close to symmetric
5th percentile	32
95th percentile	82	Sets the Excellent threshold

That the mean sits at 55 rather than 50 is a property of the tradition, not an error in the arithmetic: nine of the twelve houses are favourable or neutral, yogas are commoner than doshas, and retrogradation and vargottama have no negative counterpart. The bands are set against the observed distribution precisely so that this does not inflate every verdict.

Verification

The model is checked against six properties on every build:

Exaltation spans the sign. Each of the seven grahas is exalted at 1°, 15° and 29° of its uccha sign, and debilitated at the same degrees of the opposite.
Moolatrikona ranges. Each graha reads moolatrikona inside its range and own-sign immediately past it, except where the range lies in its own exaltation sign, which outranks it.
The maitri lattice is five-fold. Over all 42 ordered pairs, p takes only the values −2 … +2.
Temporal friendship. Signs 2, 3, 4, 10, 11 and 12 from a graha return +1; the remaining six return −1.
Combustion orbs. Each graha is combust just inside its orb, clear just outside, and cazimi within 17 arc-minutes.
Boundedness. Across 400 random charts — 3,600 graha scores and 4,800 bhava scores — every result lies in 0…100.

These are properties of the implementation, not evidence that the tradition predicts anything. The distinction matters and is not softened anywhere on this site: the arithmetic below is verified, the tradition it encodes was tested separately and did not outperform chance.

A worked example

Mercury in a chart with a Virgo lagna, debilitated in Pisces in the 7th, combust, and last of seven on Shadbala. The panel prints exactly this:

Measure	Reading	Points
Shadbala	63% of its own requirement · rank #7/7	−15.5
Dignity	Debilitated (Neecha) · Pisces	−16
Ashtakavarga	4/8 bindus in this sign	0
Avastha	Vriddha	−3
Combustion	inside the orb, not deeply	−8
Bhava	7th · kendra	+6
Yogas	Budhaditya, Neechabhanga Raja Yoga	+10
Navamsa	gains dignity · Libra	+4
From a neutral 50		35 / 100 — Weak

Notice the tension the table preserves rather than averages away: the same Mercury is bottom of the Shadbala table and debilitated, yet participates in two named yogas — one of which, Neechabhanga, exists precisely because the tradition recognised that a fallen graha is not always a ruined one. Both facts are shown. Collapsing them into a single adjective would lose the thing worth knowing.

How a bhava is judged

The same construction, with five inputs.

Measure	What it reads	Range
Bhava-bala	The engine's own house-strength figure — Bhavadhipati, Bhava Drishti and Bhava Digbala summed in rupas.	±16
Sarvashtakavarga	Bindus in the sign, against the classical average of 28.	±12
The lord's own score	The full graha assessment above, carried across at about a third weight.	±17
Lord’s placement	Where the lord stands, read as belonging to the house it rules: kendra +6, trikona +7, its own house +11, dusthana −7, and a further −5 if it sits in the 6th, 8th or 12th from the house it owns.	+11 / −12
Argala	Intervention from the 2nd, 4th and 11th, each paired against its obstruction from the 12th, 10th and 3rd. An argala with no virodhargala stands; an obstructed one does not. Malefics in the 3rd are the classical exception — there they help rather than obstruct.	±8
House karaka	The bhava’s own natural significator standing in it — karako bhava nashaya.	−6
Occupants	Weighed by nature rather than counted.	±10
Aspects	Net benefic or malefic glance on the house.	±9

Where the sources disagree

Several of these rules are not settled. Where that is so, the choice made here is stated rather than hidden, because a reader who prefers the other reading deserves to know which line to change.

Planetary war: who wins?

Sources variously give the victory to the planet further north in latitude, the brighter of the two, or the one at the lower longitude. These give different answers for the same chart. The engine therefore flags the war for both planets and awards no victory. Claiming a winner would mean picking one tradition and presenting it as settled.

Kendradhipati dosha: how strong?

That a natural benefic ruling an angle loses some benefic quality is widely accepted; how much is not. It is applied here as a modest −4, against +13 for a yogakaraka. A practitioner who weights it more heavily would raise that figure.

Karako bhava nashaya

Some read this as decisive, others as a caution that a stronger placement can overcome. It is −6 here — present, but not enough on its own to sink an otherwise well-placed graha.

Retrogradation: strength or disturbance?

Cheshta bala rewards it; other passages read a retrograde graha as unsettled. Both are honoured: it is a small positive in general, larger for a debilitated graha where retrogradation is a recognised ground for Neecha Bhanga.

The weights themselves

The texts rank these considerations but do not put numbers on most of them. The figures here are our reading of that ranking, not a quantity found in any source. They are shown in the app for exactly that reason. If Shadbala should outweigh dignity by more than it does, that is a legitimate disagreement about the weight, not about the arithmetic.

Limits worth stating

A score is not a forecast. A graha at 90 has not been shown to produce better outcomes than one at 40. It is better placed by the tradition's criteria; whether those criteria track anything is the question our method page addresses, and the honest answer there was no.
The weights are a judgement. Reasonable practitioners would set them differently. The arithmetic is shown so that disagreement can be specific.
Divisional charts are read lightly. Only the navamsa contributes, through vargottama and dignity. A full shodashavarga weighting is not attempted.
Some conditions are absent. Sahams, Ashtakavarga reductions (trikona and ekadhipatya shodhana) and argala are computed elsewhere in the app but do not feed this score.
Birth time accuracy governs everything. The lagna moves about a degree every four minutes, and functional nature — the heaviest single input after Shadbala — changes entirely with the lagna.