In practical application studies of glider formations, ocean currents are a major influencing factor in their path planning. The purpose of this paper is to solve the path planning problem of glider formations in time-varying ocean currents and establish gliders, glider formation, and ocean current models based on existing data. The Doc-CNN architecture is tailored to conform to the operation and environment characteristics of gliders in practical application. After experiments, the algorithm of the improved architecture can be used (...) in the path planning task of glider formation. The algorithm architecture is compared and tested on two datasets, grid maps and ocean maps. Doc-CNN has an advantage over architecture without being tailored to glider characteristics and makes full use of known global information and local information collected by gliders themselves. The results show that the path planning problem of glider formation in ocean currents can be solved by using Doc-CNN. (shrink)

The game of life is an excellent framework for metaphysical modeling. It can be used to study ontological categories like space, time, causality, persistence, substance, emergence, and supervenience. It is often said that there are many levels of existence in the game of life. Objects like the glider are said to exist on higher levels. Our goal here is to work out a precise formalization of the thesis that there are various levels of existence in the game of life. To (...) formalize this thesis, we develop a set-theoretic construction of the glider. The method of this construction generalizes to other patterns in the game of life. And it can be extended to more realistic physical systems. The result is a highly general method for the set-theoretical construction of substances. (shrink)

There is an absence in the literature on sports of a conceptualization of what in French are labeled sports de glisse: sports that imply gliding on water, through air, and on snow and ice, such as surfing, paragliding, skiing, and skating. Inspired by Ingold’s (1993) concept of the taskscape, we introduce the idea of the glidescape: a perceptual field in which gliding sports practitioners inhabit, create, and transform their environment while at the same time being recreated and transformed themselves. Using (...) an applied phenomenological approach, we describe the main experiential qualities and structure of the glidescape. In the quest for extended phases of effortless movement, gliders engage in a clearly accentuated rhythm with sharp contrasts between forceful effort and smooth effortlessness based on a fine-tuned proprioceptive sense for material and ecological resonance, which opens fleeting and emplaced moments of freedom and authenticity. (shrink)

Many ontologies posit levels of existence. A whole exists at a level above its parts; a set exists at a level above its members. Hardware objects are at the lowest level in a computational ontology. Software objects exist at higher levels. The game of life illustrates a stratified computational ontology. The cells in the life grid are the hardware objects. An event is a function from cells to values 0 or 1. A process is a series of events. A process (...) contains a software object iff its content is generated by some rule that is independent of the rule for cells. We give a precise existence axiom for software objects. As expected, blinkers, gliders, puffer trains, and so on are software objects. Software objects satisfy traditional conceptions of materiality. Our conception of software objects has intriguing links to modern conceptions of material particles in terms of symmetry groups and topological invariants. Software objects are not abstract. (shrink)

Only very few studies exist so far concerning the development of fibre-reinforced plastics. These materials have come into the focus of attention in recent years because of their applications in aircraft design. In Germany their foundations were laid in the interwar period with the emergence of new plastics in macromolecular chemistry and the development of pressed materials. Guided by economic interests, the producers of pressed materials, such as Dynamit AG, promoted the production of FRP in aircraft construction, at first officially, (...) and during the Second World War behind closed doors under the supervision of the German Air Ministry. However, due to a lack of resources the progress achieved in this field could not be implemented before the end of the war due to a lack of resources. The prominence of metallic materials in military aviation research was another impediment. Because of restrictions imposed by the Allies, the first FRP were used in gliders by students after World War II. Carbon fibre-reinforced plastic, currently the best known fibre-reinforced plastic, was first applied serially in Germany in 1974 in the fighter “Alpha Jet” of the aircraft manufacturer Dornier, financed by the Federal Ministry of Defence. The article analyses these developments, thereby highlighting the continuities before and after 1945. (shrink)