The achievement of a milestone in the post-YACPDB-import clean-up provides a good reason for another Meson update, but, given that my last Meson update was as long ago as October 2009, an update is clearly overdue anyway.
The milestone achieved is the completion of the rationalisation of all the myriad versions of composer names imported from YACPDB. Of course, my knowledge of composer names is far from complete, so I will have made mistakes. I will have merged two different composer names into one when I shouldn’t have and I will have failed to merge when I should have. As ever, I would be grateful for any corrections anybody can suggest.
The next (and last!) clean-up task is the rationalisation of the myriad versions of source names imported from YACPDB. Like the clean-up of composer names, this is likely to take some time, and, because of my incomplete knowledge in this area too, I shall make mistakes.
I have continued to add problems to Meson all this time and have also been identifying anticipations, mostly of #2s. I have made various changes to some of the weightings applied to some of the classification features used by my Antcheck program. This has made it more efficient at finding anticipations. This work will continue and, in due course, will be extended to #3s.
It isn’t just anticipations that Antcheck finds. It also finds versions and I have been noting these on Meson as I find them. In many cases I have no information as to the author of the version or where it was first published, and in other cases I have no information as to which is the original problem and which is the version. In all cases I have come to my own conclusions and I will have made mistakes, so I would be grateful for any corrections to this information that anybody knows about.
I have been making amendments to Meson in three areas:
(1) Checking out those #2s in Meson that are unsound and making corrections from original publication or quoted sources where possible.
(2) Checking out the publication details of those problems in Meson that have no year of publication and/or no source details noted and adding same where I can.
(3) Checking out those helpmates in Meson without number of solution information and/or twin information and adding such where I can.
I am still adding problems from YACPDB - but manually! Additions from my own library of chess problem books and magazines are also continuing, though I probably shan’t live long enough to completely exhaust the resources of my own library!
Once the clean-up is complete, I will start to make all the software changes I have mentioned in previous posts.
