[ExI] 23andTriangulation

[sm at vreedom.de]

I felt frustrated finding out that all my ancestors came from a small town
(in Hessen :) ) where not one of them moved for 500 years!
Where were the explorers, innovators, rebels??

Stephan


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] Im Auftrag von spike
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 10. Juli 2013 07:08
An: 'ExI chat list'
Betreff: Re: [ExI] 23andTriangulation


>... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2013 4:33 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] 23andTriangulation

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 6:46 PM, spike <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
> Ideas please: as a test, is there a way to get a dozen of us, or 
> fewer, make an excel file with columns of 64 numbers, each a random 
> integer between 0 and 255.  We define as sisters those columns which 
> share an average of 32 numbers.  Cousin columns share 16, second 
> cousins 8 and so on.  Next I form the triads, and see if I can get the 
> algorithm to find which columns are related to which.
>
> From that, I should be able to figure out which column is related to 
> which by triangulation, ja?

That is not what we mean with the term "Genetic Algorithm"  :)

>...I don't think it would be difficult to implement your matching
algorithm.  I'm not really clear on how you define the triads.  It sounds
like you are going to do that manually until you have enough practice with
it to describe an algorithm...

I realize my description of what I have in mind is terrible.  I think in
equations, not in words, oy.

OK, damn, I won't be able to get this done before vacation, and much of my
vacation is camping, so I won't have internet.

I am being tripped on 23andMe with a remarkable discovery, a pattern that
came more and more clear as I discovered ancestors farther and farther back:
alllll of them are from these little tiny isolated communities.  I can find
not one example of an old-time ancestor from a big city, not one.  I have
been searching for any ancestor from New York or Boston or any of the old
time cities, but all I find are roots in the country, very small towns.
This has deep implications for what I am trying to do.

Some of my earliest known relatives were apparently German soldiers hired by
the British and told they would fight Indians.  Then when they got here,
they found out they would be fighting the colonists.  Plenty of them didn't
want to fight actual white guys.  So when Washington crossed the Delaware
and captured about 1000 Hessians, he suffered almost no losses.  The various
historians have failed to explain an important factor in that very light
casualty count: the Hessians had nothing against American colonists and had
no desire to shoot them.  They really didn't put up much of a fight.

After the battle, General Washington didn't want to feed all those guys, and
the British no longer trusted their hired German guns, since it appeared
their loyalty to their employers was questionable.  So Washington ended up
paroling most of them, after which they went off deep into the woods and
started little communities way back there in western Virginia, Kentucky,
Ohio and such, but it was unclear whether they were still enemies of America
and possibly enemies of the British, so they stayed in closed little remote
communities for a century in some cases.  I have learned that I descended
from those kinds of people.  I still haven't found a single ancestor from
one honest big-assed American city.

This has implications for the patterns I am seeing in 23andMe.  If small
remote communities formed, they were extensively interbred with a small gene
pool.  So I have cases where we are discovering what may be 6th cousins by 8
different paths, which shows up as the shared-SNP equivalent to a 5th
cousin.

It will be very difficult to untangle this knot.

I am pretty sure it will require a sophisticated algorithm running on
computers to solve it.

More later,

spike



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