The Sailing Ship's Return

Reinforcement Sailing

This thesis examines applying reinforcement learning to sailing. We give two conceptually different models of a simple sailing boat. Standard tabular reinforcement learning is shown to be ineffective in controlling these naturally continuous models. We examine a method [Smith, 2001b] which adaptively quantises both the state and action spaces and show that it has similar performance to the tabu...

(Sailing to) Byzantium: the Kantian Sublime

Sailing through uncertainty.

choice but to pursue science. My dad wouldn’t accept anything but a science degree. He told me in no uncertain terms that if I really wanted to be an English major or a writer, as I said I did, I would need to figure out how to pay for college on my own. I chose a school 2000 miles from home and overloaded my schedule with literature classes that I claimed were required, but I wasn’t brave or i...

Mathematical Theory of Sailing

We show by computational solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with friction force boundary conditions, that the classical inviscid circulation theory by Kutta-Zhukovsky for lift and laminar viscous boundary layer theory by Prandtl for drag, which have dominated 20th century fluid dynamics, do not correctly describe the real turbulent airflow around a sail under tacking. We sho...

The KJH: Sailing over the horizon

On March 31, 2010, the first English issue of the Korean Journal of Hematology (KJH) was published and dispatched to overseas libraries and domestic readers. It was the emotional zenith of my editorial career. At last, the KJH has been reborn as an international journal to fulfill our mission of delivering new and important scientific knowledge and information regarding all aspects of hematolog...