So there was a good bit of talk about skillwires flying around in the last few days. Rather than necro a ton of threads I'll just post this little diddy from augmentation about the interface between skill wires, commlinks, and activesofts



Formating mine to draw a parallel. So there you have it in black and white. It isn't REQUIRED that you actually slot chips anymore. A Skillwire can run softs stored on a comlink. I guess you could fixate the word onboard, but you would have to start inventing bandwidth issue rules to keep it from working

At my table we had been imagining active softs as a libary of function calls for muscle movements, almost like an SDK for a robot. When you decide to kick some one while chipping unarmed combat you are literally are doing the 2070 DNI version opening the console on your wires and typing
/root.load("Skinlink:\myBlackComlink\activesofts\Unarmed_4");
/Unarmed_4.moves.roundHouse("redShirt", "face");
And the skill wires system functioned as a computer that could both compile and execute muscle scripts in real time, assuming you had the right libraries loaded. I think many people kinda used this model, but it doesn't explain why you don't wind up actually remembering how to do something you just did and actually building the skill. How do you use technical skills to design something. Also the rating capping max skill rank makes perfect sense, but why can't you have have a bigger library, thus slotting lots of skills at once. Compiling and outputing the scripts would be the computational bottle neck, not the size of your code base. And hardest to swallow, how do you even vaguely begin to chip Social skills. I know that we all have either gone mad, or have gotten very very good at over looking this kind of thing in our beloved game, but this time we can actually use some break throughs in cog-sci for some bonus dice on our sanity check...

I'm not sure how many of you are up on your quantum physics based theories of free will and consciousness. For those of you who aren't the creditable theories revolve around an observer employing the quantum Zeno effect to maintain a neurological template of action (I underlined good search terms if you care to go digging). Dumbing all this down to my level, what is going on is that the transmission of neural impulses happens on such a small scale that quantum wackiness ensues. All of your neurons are firing and not firing Schroedinger style. This means that our brain state / CNS state is basically in a wave state ... until something observes this and collapses the wave form. That something is your free will / Observer. What free will is under this model is selecting from all the possible actions you could take or thoughts you could think (your templates for action) and using quantum Zeno effect to skew the odds so that you actually have that though or do that action, by collapsing the wave for in the way you want and holding it in place long enough for it to happen. In short you can choice to actually do anything you could possibly do. I could stop typing and start doing forms from Kyokushin, or Kajukembo (which I've trained), but not Mia Thai, Wushu, and Krav Maga. Current theory offer templates for action as an explanation of "muscle memory" part of skill. As I'm typing, I'm more or less focusing on a letter and then thinking "do it". If I didn't know how to touch type I couldn't do that because I don't have the temple for how to hit "A" on this keyboard ... Unless I have skillwires.

I in light of these findings I imagine skillwires working by artificially lacing your neural state waveform with the templates for action of some skill. They make it so your are and are not flipping out and cutting heads off, as YOU WILL and executed by observation. Active softs become ROMs of the templates for action that add up to skill. The SW themselves print that potentiality onto the mix of what could be in your CNS. Running this fluff in your games does a couple cool things. This lets the rating of SW be interpreted as the finesse of the system. It can only at so many templates, measured in skill ranks, to the mix. First I know the real reason that SWs have no instructional value is game balance, so I just rolled with it. But while your wires are on you have literally already learned the skill, so you can't learn it again. Neural nets are awesome because they can evolve and adapt. However, just like animals population don't go "Hey you know what would be sweet? evolving myself into a population of animals with massive organ redundancy so we are harder to kill by stabbing!", your CNS wouldn't think "hmmm I bet my capacity to use pistols could get turned off at any moment. Better randomly duplicate those neural pathways". More subtly this is a good explanation of how invention and social skills work, as well as p-fix chips. SW can effect the probability of some occurring to you. I don't know exactly how to change the oil on anything. With this flavor of skill wire, it would occur to me to get all the tools I would need. Even designing a new drone, or a radical mod, the SWs would make design heuristics trees available to you. It would also put best practices at your finger tips. I could really image how such a system could duplicate any skill. And for p-fixing, I used to have to think of it as basically an agent with a persona program rigging a meat-puppet. You have more options under this system. Image how much you would be like some one if you had the habit of focusing on the same things, got interested in the same ideas. This about how similar your body language would be to someone else if you payed attention to your body the same way they do. Mayb sprinkle on a few temples for specific reflexes.

Anywho my 2 and food for thought. If I got any of my science wrong, please, tear me a new one. I only barely get this stuff.