Further to Julian's & others' comments about CW Skimmer removing the need to tune the band, a skilled part of the operating experience which is enjoyable to many [but not all!] of us:
My friend is hot to write a software layer which will sit on top of CW Skimmer and which will win contests -- entirely on its own. Put another way, it is the next logical step after the PDP-7 program which did QSOs on its own, described in this thread. The amateur will just point my friend's software at a contest , hit start, and leave the shack. I know just enough about artificial intelligence and expert systems to believe that he very possibly can do it. Then what? Will we still enjoy contesting, knowing that computers will win every one? Maybe. Deep Blue - the IBM parallel processor - beat Garry Kasparov, but people still like chess. But do the Chess Masters [ the counterparts of the contest high-scorers] still like it as much as they did before Deep Blue? I haven't a clue, but somehow I doubt it. Will we outlaw it, like ARRL may or may not do with CW SKimmer? Will it make any difference? eric, feeling uneasy, and looking back wistfully to the days of Spark Gap VA7DZ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
