Perfect Matching in Sailing
In the article by Perhson, she discusses the importance of weight when sailing. Her article is to encourage new sailors on getting more experience in bigger boats by being “rail meat’. This phrase is used to refer to people who are crews on a boat where their only job is to be extra body wait and move to different places on the boat This keeps the boat moving at its fastest and if you do not have enough people when the wind is strong, the boat could be dangerous to sail and risk flipping over. She continues to say how in different wind conditions different numbers of people are required on the boat to keep it moving fast. The article ends with how to author and some of her friends were brought into sailing through being rail meat first and now love to race. The main takeaway from this article relating to perfect matching is that when boats weigh differently, they will either go faster or slower, thus affecting their finish placement in a race. In moderate wind conditions, boats with too many crews on board will go slower and get a worse result because of this. Opposed to a boat with the optimal number of people which will likely do better in a race because they have a lighter load on the boat.
The process of adding and removing people or crews from the boat is what can be seen as perfect matching. Perfect Matching is an assignment of nodes on the left and right that allows all nodes to be assigned to another node and for every node pair to produce its highest result. If we were to set people as nodes we could illustrate this.
Each boat only has one skipper and a varied amount of crews depending on the wind conditions. Let’s set the skippers (or Captains) of a boat as A, B, and C. Each skipper needs at least one crew to sail but could sail with a maximum of three crews. These crews will be displayed as 1, 2, and 3. Each of these skippers weighs different amounts and performs in different ways depending on how many crews they have. This overall placement will be the values. We are going to assume that the wind conditions are the same for everyone. In sailing you want to have the lowest score possible so to perform perfect matching, we will consider the lowest score the winner.
The perfect matching results in the lowest score if each skipper is given only one, two, or three crews. Skipper A would be assigned to 1 crew, B would be assigned to 2 crews, and C would be assigned to 2 crews. This would result in Skippers A, B, and C combined to 20 total points.