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Board » Sailonline Yacht Club » brainaid

Posted by Aklinyolu1 Posts 12 Registered at 2008-12-25 20:50:54	2009-11-28 12:14:53 - Re: brainaid
	hi all first of all, congrats and thanks to brainaid for his results and for building such a tool. distributing the same tool and giving the same chance to all the sailors mean that we can give the same chance to a 5 year old child who has no idea about sailing but only keyboard and maybe numbers... i dont see why i shall play against machines that has no idea about sailing? since i hv started with sol, i am using my own natural brain, looking at weather forecats and calculating angles etc etc... i hv good or bad results, i dont mind as long as i have pleasure, but all i am playing is a real game with no external support. i hv concluded that it is impossible to compete with the sailors using external weather forecasts and sailplanners. so we do have a small community and we r competing within ourselves disregarding other players on the list. whatever brainaid is doing is great. i guess that can be a nice tool for professionals in real life and that he can market it. i may be one of the first buyers to use it in our regattas. but from sol side, which is only a game, we may not use such instruments, or we shall have different rankings. i did hv in the past mentioned 2 subjects, via email or forum, i pay again attention to them: the weather forecats may face serious changes upon updates, then it is not fair for the ones not using external forecats. and the other subject is about the weight of the races; short or long, i guess that they shall not be same weighted and i hv suggested a formula for that, in the forum. sol is just a game, but i have learnt a lot in terms of navigation! so why dont we keep it with an amateur spirit? i am participating less to the races, there may be few things to improve to keep the motivation high?... have nice winds! aklinyolu1 --- Last Edited by TUR Aklinyolu1 at 2009-11-28 12:21:39 ---
Posted by TUR_AC505 Posts 72 Registered at 2009-07-07 15:23:10	2009-11-28 15:17:26 - Re: brainaid
	I was not agreement with my fellow countryman re using programs...however, when I read his last post his comment about people with no idea about sailing participate and turn this into a PC game ! I fully support what he says. In the real world using navigation programming is unavoidable and acceptable, but unlike the sol environment, there you have to know the seas and sailing its not only about navigation programming. Making the nav program available to everybody will bu unfortunate and kill the sol.
Posted by NZL_PaulR Posts 311 Registered at 2008-07-22 12:21:30	2009-11-28 18:26:23 - Re: brainaid
	Maybe or maybe not. Using "Planning programs" is one of the major benefits in SoL because you can quickly learn how they work, their advantages and most importantly their disadvantages. The "LEARNING" to use benefit IMHO is wonderful, and a real benefit and skill development for when you do a real ocean race. The alternative of struggling to learn a new system at sea is very VERY hard. So practice using any planning program is good, but when you can compete against others, your bad decisions show up sooner. The great advantage of using planners in SoL is that you don't get cold, wet, hungry and possibly sea sick. Once having learned and used a planning program, IMHO, one is better equiped to SoL race WITHOUT needing to use one to see if you can beat the others. Just that little more incentive and challange to improve your decision making process. Using any "tool" is hard the first time. By the 31st time it is easier By the 101st time, very easy . . . . but now you need to move onto chapter 2??? LOL If it breaks, it's not strong enough!
Posted by TUR_AC505 Posts 72 Registered at 2009-07-07 15:23:10	2009-11-29 00:38:07 - Re: brainaid
	but you are suggesting to use sol as a training ground for nav programs! I want to have fun and develop my navigational feel and senses (which i believe is more important than learning to use a program). SOL should not be a training tool. I am an old school engineer and although I use state-of-the-art software to design which is available today, I still use and value my judgment based on my insight and feel developed from the times when we had to work with paper, pencil and slide rulers...that's why I believe its something more valuable than just accepting the output of a software which is a closed box and one doesn't have a clue what's in the box if you don't have the feel.
Posted by NZL_PaulR Posts 311 Registered at 2008-07-22 12:21:30	2009-11-29 01:20:32 - Re: brainaid
	Planning software is only a tool and the weather forcasts are only learned guesses based upon modelling, to crunch the numbers. There needs to be "feelings" and estimates of the chances, probability that the actual weather will be exactly as forcasted. IRL this does not happen, Calm spots get bigger and capture one; you may not sail as fast as your polars, even if they were 100% accurate. IMHO and my own experience, I can only say I learned a lot about sail planning using "Sail Planner". So for me SoL was a wonderful experience "Learning" to use a sail planning program. It certainly gave me many more examples and situations to practice and experiment with, rather than waiting for one long ocean race once every two or three years, if my domestic manager, SWMBO wife, agrees to let me go to sailing for that long. Basically most places from NZ take a week to get there and are in simple terms all have the nearest land about 1,000+ miles away. I have enough problems racing every evening in the week already. I'm never home!! If it breaks, it's not strong enough!
Posted by Rhino Posts 7 Registered at 2008-12-09 21:44:05	2009-12-01 00:31:46 - Re: brainaid
	brainaid: "Now, after finishing the real brain work above, I use a script to program my planed track into SOL using DCs (delayed commands)" Hmmmm ... as I suspected, your perfect tracks gave it away! Manually entering, and editing, the DC's is a time-consuming pain and I agree - you had an unfair advantage. But if you can provide a tool we can all use to improve this process, then please allow me to say 'Thank you very much!' And please come back and race with us - your expertise is sadly missed! Cheers, Rhino
Posted by SWE54 Posts 29 Registered at 2007-08-11 10:02:20	2009-12-02 00:07:04 - Re: brainaid
	Reading all this and getting a bit disappointed. Some of the fun and joy has been taken out of this for me now. I don't mind any stand alone tools at all but when there are features used not available to all I consider that unfair to express it mildly. Yes, I use a router now and then, mostly on longer races but not always. On short races the router is not of that much help and I sail most of the time "unplugged". I would very much like to see brainaid back into the game, but on the same page as the rest of us. It's only a game,let's keep it like that. /Michael (SWE54) --- Last Edited by Michael at 2009-12-02 00:08:34 --- --- Last Edited by Michael at 2009-12-02 00:09:58 ---
Posted by Schakel Posts 176 Registered at 2008-12-19 09:19:00	2009-12-02 12:04:32 - Re: brainaid
	SWE54 said @ 2009-12-02 00:07:04: Reading all this and getting a bit disappointed. Some of the fun and joy has been taken out of this for me now. I don't mind any stand alone tools at all but when there are features used not available to all I consider that unfair to express it mildly. Yes, I use a router now and then You've just proved how subjective the concept of fairness is, because you see, for various reasons routing software is NOT available to all. So, if at times you'll be using routing software to aid you in your decisions in order to try and gain an advantage over other competitors, you'll do so because it is available to you. Eddie just took what was available to him to gain an advantage over you and others with similar software. If it is taking some of the fun out of it for you, image what the others who don't have any such options might be feeling. Philip (Schakel)
Posted by SWE54 Posts 29 Registered at 2007-08-11 10:02:20	2009-12-02 15:26:37 - Re: brainaid
	Schakel said @ 2009-12-02 12:04:32: You've just proved how subjective the concept of fairness is, because you see, for various reasons routing software is NOT available to all. So, if at times you'll be using routing software to aid you in your decisions in order to try and gain an advantage over other competitors, you'll do so because it is available to you. Eddie just took what was available to him to gain an advantage over you and others with similar software. If it is taking some of the fun out of it for you, image what the others who don't have any such options might be feeling. Philip (Schakel) As I understood it he had a software that communicated directly with SOL. That is over the line for me. Maybe I understood it wrong but having features "in SOL" not available to others is not ok. /Michael (SWE54) --- Last Edited by Michael at 2009-12-02 15:28:29 ---
Posted by Schakel Posts 176 Registered at 2008-12-19 09:19:00	2009-12-02 16:39:00 - Re: brainaid
	SWE54 said @ 2009-12-02 15:26:37: As I understood it he had a software that communicated directly with SOL. That is over the line for me. Maybe I understood it wrong but having features "in SOL" not available to others is not ok. /Michael (SWE54) --- Please don't take the the wrong way but it is over the line for you because it is not available to you and it puts you at a disadvantage. If your router was, say, Sailplanner and it had a similar function built in, you wouldn't for a minute have thought it unfair towards users of Deckman or Expedition. The routing tool you are using most likely is not plugged in to SOL, but you are not manually entering the weather data, are you? Elsewhere on this forum, people have asked about ways to automatically enter SOL's data into Expedition. Why? Well, to gain an advantage by automation, of course. Basically the exact opposite of what Eddie was doing. Yet not a single post of how unfair that would be. And I am not so sure there aren't already people doing precisely that. The only thing that Eddie has done, was outsmarting all of us. But sooner or later, somebody was bound to. Philip (Schakel)

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