We Robots

[tekbspa!tavan at uunet.UU.NET]

Excellent posting by John, K2MM.  Made me regret my own
premature comments.  I promise to read at least a full day's
mail before replying in the future....

It would be unfortunate if contest bandwidth were gobbled up
by dozens of identical robots, especially if they were
CQing.  But legally, I don't think you can stop it. 
Separate listings (or no listings) would dump them all in
one place, away from human listings.

If someone does commercialize robot control software, it
will likely be highly tunable, with parameters that let a
human set things like band select strategey, CQ/S&P
guidelines, speed behaviour, etc.  Hopefully, though, you
only get one chance to set parameters before the contest -
alterations during the contest period would make you
"multi-op" ...  or make your computer "single robot,
assisted?"

Maybe a listing of robot scores could include the "base
software" in order to give credit to the authors?  (We don't
list station equipment except in commentary, but software
should make a bigger difference.)

Note to the operator ranking conversants:  Might a select
few robots serve as a good metric of the location factor
that we could use to compute coefficients in a ranking
formula? For example, what if there were one 100w robot in
each ranking area running a tribander and wires at about 50
feet?  Very similar station and "operator" but very
different location factors.  Performance rank in a contest
could be based on a percentage of the robot's score rather
than the score of a regional pacemaker which is admittedly a
highly variable metric.  Local operators would all agree
to work together to find the best location within their
area to be their pacemaker robot!

73,

/Rick Tavan N6XI
rick at tss.com