Further Use of Punched Card Equipment in Predicting the Performances of Double‐Crossed Corn Hybrids

ILLANG and Sprague2 have described a method M for using punched card equipment in predicting the performance of corn double crosses from data on the single crosses among the parental inbred lines. Their method required hand sorting of the single-cross data cards to group them properly for the predictions. A procedure now has been developed which permits all operations to be made by machine. For convenience in making the double-cross predictions, Millang and Sprague prepared a mimeographed list3 of all of the possible double crosses among the different numbers of inbred lines up to and including 16 lines. The authors identify the inbred parents of their double crosses by code letters arranged in alphabetical order. The single crosses among these lines are identified by a code number. The double crosses then are listed, the coded pedigree and the identifying code numbers of the four single crosses used to predict its performance being shown for each double cross. In order to adapt the above list of double crosses to the new method of predicting, the listed double crosses are numbered consecutively ; n the-sequence they occur in the mimeographed publication. These numbers then are used to identify them in the machine operations.