Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Congratulations on your retirement (and birthday, although I'm a little late). You'll soon wonder how you ever managed to fit in time for a job, if your retirement is anything like as busy as mine!

You could combine the language-independence of your notation with the flexibility of Justin's: 1. use upper case for going up the tree (earlier in time) or at the same level, lower case for coming down 2. indicate a marriage/partnership with = (so a wife is =X, husband =Y) The first person is needed ...

Thanks for fixing up the first comment (it did show that angle brackets was a bad choice!). Allowing more than one ancestor inside the parentheses does make the string a bit harder to parse and count: for example it's easy to see that YY(Y)YYYY (all male descendants both sides from a male MRCA) will share ...

The angle brackets in my previous comment where removed by the commenting software (it probably thinks they're html tags), so they're out. :-) For example, on the "A suggestion for the MRCA" there was a Y inside greater than and less than signs before the final XY of XYXXY. Parentheses would work better.

Excellent idea, Louis. Lots of information in a very concise and clear format. I think it would be useful to know there's a most recent common ancestor in the path, and where. How many generations back to the MRCA is important (I think also there would be subtle differences in the probabilities of ...

Don't let the reviewers get to you, and you don't have to explain yourself to them. Things happen, plans change, priorities change. It's understandable, at least to normal people if not those reviewers. One of my websites still lists certain features that "will be added in the coming weeks" - and that was ...