Download the AASK Engine here
AASK (Axiomatic Ancestral Stratification by Kinship) is our patent-pending next-generation bioinformatic process — an "expert system" in AI parlance — which takes CMA (Correlated Multiphasic Analysis) to a whole other level.
AASK takes the results of the CMA process — a collection of hundreds or even thousands of individuals — and organizes them according to how they're related to you through your "brick wall" ancestor.
Bear in mind that neither CMA nor AASK will "do Genealogy" for you (maybe someday we'll invent a system to do that) but rather, CMA and AASK provide end users with "Actionable Intelligence" — the kind of "AI" genealogists can use to perform traditional research: building up pedigrees, finding common places, surnames, and ancestors, and ultimately connecting their DNA matches to the ancestral lines of their "brick wall" ancestors!
So, how does this work?
CMA takes your DNA matches, and the DNA matches of your known relatives, and gives you a collection of individuals connected to your DNA test through the ancestors of your selected "brick wall" ancestor. This could be 100, 200, 300, or several thousand matches, depending on your test results.
AASK takes CMA's results, along with a list of the relatives used in CMA, plus the full set of DNA matches of each individual in your CMA results (our desktop AASK Engine supports up to 3,000 individual sets of DNA results of up to 100,000 matches each) and autonomously performs its magic using Axiomatic Set Theory and Vector Algebra (we just know you were wondering!)
In the example illustration, the CMA process used the In Common With matches of three closely related individuals — in addition to the DNA test results several other distantly related family members — to assemble a set of something like a thousand DNA matches connected to our three primary individuals through the ancestors of their (great-)great-grandmother, about whom they know next to nothing. AASK then takes CMA's list of roughly a thousand individuals, along with the test IDs of our three family members, and the one thousand sets of DNA test results corresponding to each individual on the CMA list and does its thing.
In the right half of the illustration, AASK shows that individuals a through g all share DNA with our family members. Individuals a, b, and c are descended from one set of our brickwall's grandparents, while individual f is descended from the other set of grandparents. Individuals d and e are descended from the parents of one member of the brickwall's grandparents in individual f's pedigree, and individual g is descended from the parents of one of the four grandparents of the ancestor of a, b, and c. Imagine these connections applied across all 1,000 individuals in the CMA list, and you have some idea of what AASK can do — autonomously, without any involvement from the end user, even if none of the DNA matches on the CMA list have constructed an online tree of any sort!
If you'd like to learn more about CMA and AASK, register for Discovering New Ancestors' workshop at the Ontario Ancestors' 2024 Conference this June in Toronto, Canada.
Download the desktop AASK Engine and AASK Quick-Start Guide!
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