Exercise 14: Searching mechanisms, Virtual worlds and Cyberagents

1. What is a spider? What does it do?

According to TechTarget (2005), a spider is a program that visits Websites and reads their pages in order to create entries for a search engine index. Typically, Spiders are programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their owners as new or updated. Entire sites or specific pages can be visited and indexed optionally. Spiders can visit many sites simultaneously; it can span a large of the “web” through several ways. One way is to follow all the hypertext links in each page until all the pages have been read. Beside that, spider can be used to gather information from any site and especially useful for creating automated task such as maintaining links or validating HTML code.

Reference

TechTarget (2005). Spider. Retrieved from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213035,00.html

2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

In computer science, a software agent is a piece of software that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency (Wikipedia, 2010).

According to Peterindian.net (n.d), there are many type of software agents, each type has different function. Some of them listed below are the example:

- Cooperative agents communicate with other agents and act acts follow the result of that communication.

- Proactive agents initiate action without user prompting

- Adaptive agents, learning from past experience, and change to the given situation

- Personal agents are proactive and serve individual users.

- Collaborative agents are proactive and cooperate with other agents.

References

PeterIndian.net (n.d). Intelligent Software Agents – An Overview. Retrieved from http://www.peterindia.net/SoftwareAgentsView.html

Wikipedia (2010). Software Agent. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.

Umn (1999) identify that there are many activities in e-commerce which software agents are implementing

- Procurement: obtaining materials, services, managing inflow into the organization towards the end user

- Brokering Service: finding information about products, sellers, and prices, providing protection for privacy, validating purchasers’ credit, billing and accounting, etc.

- Digital Libraries and Recommending Services: retrieving information from distributed sources, filtering information on contents, collaborative fillering

- Notification Services: notifying of new books or CDs, notifying when specific products are available at a specific price.

References

Umn (1999). Agents and other ‘Intelligent Software’ for e-Commerce. Retrieved from http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~gini/csom.html

4. Computing ethics and bot programming case study: rocky

a. Get an account username and password from the lecturer to LC_MOO at http://ispg .csu.edu.au:7680 and login to the Welcome Lobby

After I logged in with the username: train3 and password: train 3. This popup windows is displayed.

b. Hold a 5-minute discussion with Rocky on a special topic. Commands and chat are entered in the command box: act rocky (start bot) hush rocky (stop bot)

c. Rocky is an ELIZA-like bot. Report your findings

Rocky can give a corresponding action follow a pre-defined instruction. It is pretty interesting, but the answer is sometimes not match with my question. However, we can create an instruction by LC-MOO command to make it more excited