A New Ghost in the Machine: AI Designs a DN Plank

by Deb Whitehorse | Nov 17, 2025 | 2025-2026, DN, Home Page

Iceboating has seen its share of firsts, and this may be another one. In the 1930s the stern-steerer DEBUTANTE showed up with the first aluminum runners, and Chuck Kotovic Jr. won the 1954 ISA with one of the first Dacron sails.

Now a new kind of experiment is underway. Tomasz Zakrzewski, a Polish DN sailor who has raced many championships on our lakes, has built what may be the first runner plank designed entirely by artificial intelligence. It was not a shortcut. Tomasz spent hours feeding the system with detailed files and measurements to train it. With enough data, the machine can analyze patterns and generate something that has never been built before.

This week marks a milestone for me — and possibly a first in the history of iceboating.

I have just finished building a runner plank designed entirely by artificial intelligence.

Over the past days, I trained an AI model by feeding it detailed information about more than 100 runner planks built over the last decade — including materials used, layup schedules, structural failures, stiffness measurements, field results, and performance notes. Based on this dataset, ChatGPT proposed its own optimized layup concept… and the design was so interesting that I decided to build it. Continue reading.