Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

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.