IlliGAL Blogging

This weekend is Memorial Day weekend and for my family that means that it is the beginning of sailing season on Lake Michigan. Today we board our time-share lease 33-foot Beneteau sailboat Urdragon and go sailing at Fairwind Sailing in Burnham Harbor near the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Of course, readers of this blog are less interested in what I do in my spare time and are relentlessly interested in the world of genetic algorithms, so it is interesting that GAs are increasingly used in sailboat design, control, and navigation.

A quick Google search on yacht and genetic algorithms turns up many interesting links, but the first article on this topic I remember was some pretty cool work by Carlo Poloni. The study used multiobjective GAs and neural-net surrogate evaluation to optimize yacht design. A pdf of a 1999 presentation is here. I believe that Carlo's work on multiobjective GAs has formed the basis for design optimization software at an Italian firm called Enginsoft.