What are your guys thoughts? Double mast concept seems to be a game changer for super wide span wings.
Similar to the aquaskipper, along with many other human powered foils.
This is an iteration on the older concepts, but it is certainly innovative in that it enables 2hr+ flat water pumping. This gets a little bit meta, but I really like the approach of valuing novelty. The best evolutionary strategy is to explore and exploit novelty. This is how most great innovations came to exist, while exploring how to reach some other objective.
Comparing Novelty based vs Objective based innovation strategies:
Novelty search does not reward progress as defined by objectives or performance, rather it rewards being different. It is evolution without objectives. It believes complexity growth in natural evolution is not a byproduct of optimizing fitness, but rather a consequence of nature’s open-ended propensity to discover various ways to meet challenges of life. And this has lead to perpetual discovery of novelty, and increase in complexity.
Novelty search mitigates deception — in which seemingly promising fitness candidates fall into local maxima, and thus can never attain global maxima causing evolutionary algorithms to fail. Deception is unavoidable with objective-based search.
It is important to note that novelty is not a random walk kind of situation — novelty rewards diverging behaviors, thus creating a constant pressure to do something new. source
In short, I think it is absolutely epic that someone has done this, and I think net positive for foiling.
(zero interest in trying one until they figure out how to make it turn )
To add to the novelty, this is why amplifying novelty (by sharing it, discussing it etc) is important for the evolutionary process. Someone in a tangential or unrelated field looks at this and goes hmmm that might be useful for my idea to build a solar powered efoil and the process continues
Will the pump foilers follow suit I wonder. I reckon the box shape adds structural integrity such that the front foil could start going mega high aspect.
Seems like a rad breakthrough! I’m curious to see what could be done with one of these attached to a downwind board - can it just be ollied up?