Re: [lmi] Experimental implementation of non-MEC solves

[Greg Chicares]

On 2009-02-17 13:34Z, Greg Chicares wrote:
> 
> This non-MEC solve replaces the old feature that increases the
> specified amount to avoid a MEC. That old feature will soon be
> removed. It wasn't very practical, because requiring a (large)
> increase every seven years presumes future insurability. And the
> way we implemented it in 2002 left much to be desired: it fails
> to increase the initial specified amount when necessary, and it
> doesn't work at all for group carveout.

While trying to adjust system tests for the elimination of that
old feature, I've discovered two previously-unidentified problems
with it:

(1) It increased the specified amount after 'MaxIncrAge', which
is the highest age at which an increase is allowed. That could be
overridden temporarily, but...

(2) It apparently increased the specified amount only for the
primary "current" basis. For cell 268 in the yet-unpublished
'mec7.cns' testdeck (which probably should be published, for the
'sample' product), I tried hardcoding the specified amount thus:

    <SpecifiedAmount>1000000 #7;1692471 #7;2356440 #7;3015340 #7;3694783 
#7;4508383 #7;5444159 #7;6343003</SpecifiedAmount>

and (suspending the 'MaxIncrAge' restriction) found that the
eighth-year "EOYDeathBft" value in previously-saved results was
1692471 (as expected) on this basis only:
  curr charges and genacct int, full sepacct int
but 1000000 on all other bases. That's just plain wrong, and
always has been.

Even after I removed disused "debugging" code on 20090215T1301Z,
IncreaseSpecAmtToAvoidMec() still accounts for ten percent of the
monthiversary-processing code ('ihs_avmly.cpp'), and slightly
more than one percent of the total marked defects in lmi. The
silver lining in this gray cloud is that no one has really used
this faulty (soon to be former) feature.

Here's a command that fixes up system-test output, except of
course for the hopeless cell 268 and the corresponding composite:

cd /opt/lmi/touchstone
for z in *.test; do grep --quiet 'AvoidMec==Increase specified amount' $z \
&& sed -i $z \
-e'/AvoidMec/s/AvoidMec==Increase specified amount/AvoidMec==Allow MEC/'; \
done