“Fundamentally you want to teach a computer how to sail a given boat design in the simulator as best as possible,” Hohn said. McKinsey used an extremely advanced process called reinforcement learning to allow the bot to learn from its own mistakes. “The idea here is to get to the base design quicker and then keep going and see how far you can push that design.” “What they found in previous campaigns is that it’s always near the end of that campaign that they get to the base design,” he said.
Project leader Nicolas Hohn, more at home in the French alps than on the water, said the bot’s unprecedented learning abilities vastly accelerated the design process. Importantly, it does it very quickly, faster than the sailors can do run after run after run.” Against Pete it does a little bit better but it does it consistently better. “If I got in the simulator it would blow me away. It out-performs the sailors consistently in most wind ranges.
And in fact it learns to sail the simulator better than the sailors can sail it. “And how we did that is to build an AI bot that can sail the simulator. “And when the designers put in a hydrofoil the sailors need to come off the water and test it and they need to do a bunch of runs on the simulator to get consistent data.”įox, a keen sailor, said McKinsey’s solution was “to essentially take the sailors out of the question.” You have to get Pete (Burling), Blair (Tuke) and the other key controllers, depending on how you set it up, four of them in the simulator working on together to log a run. “The trouble is that to operate the simulator it takes the whole afterguard of the boat. “The Team New Zealand simulator is arguably the most advanced sailing simulator in the world and for that reason they’re very confident when they load in a hydrofoil to test in the simulation environment they’re going to get really good data that is very applicable on the water,” McKinsey senior partner Brian Fox told The Associated Press from New Jersey. McKinsey’s solution was to develop and AI bot that could learn to use the simulator by itself, without the sailors needing to be present. Time is critical in America’s Cup campaigns and Team New Zealand partnered with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and its subsidiary QuantumBlack to come up with an artificial intelligence solution to maximize use of the simulator. The hydrofoils make the AC75 class boats fly above the water.
It did its vital work in the computer simulator on which Team New Zealand’s winning hydrofoil designs were rigorously tested and proven. The mystery sailor was a bot, a robot, or an artificial intelligence creation which became in effect a virtual sailor.
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