Exercise 14

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

A spider is a program which crawls the Internet in a specific way for a specific purpose. The purpose may be gathering, filtering and potentially aggregating information for a user. For example, a search enginee (Google, Yahoo) (Jones, 2006).

2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

There are four main types of intelligent software agents (Wikipedia, 2006).

1. 
   
   Buyer agents or shopping bots
2. 
   
   User or personal agents
3. 
   
   Monitoring and Surveillance agents
4. 
   
   Data Mining agents

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

The various activities according to different agents are:-

• 
  
  Buyer agents or shopping bots -- Amazon.com (shopping bot) , provide a list of books that may fit your interest or base on your buying history in that site.
• 
  
  User or personal agents -- jobdb.com , sending email about the current available jobs in the market which fit with your personal resume data.
• 
  
  Monitoring and Surveillance agents -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, monitors inventory, planning and scheduling equipment ordering to keep costs down.
• 
  
  Data Mining agents -- use in credit card company, provide a list of consumer's interests according to their shopping behaviour/habit. They can have promotion on particular products or services which can keep the card user to use their card.

4. Computing ethics and bot programming case study: rocky

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

Get is from the CSU interact. Train1 to Train20.

    b. Hold a 5-minute discussion with Rocky on a special topic. Commands and chat are entered in the command box (bottom-left of screen in Figure 11): act rocky (start bot) hush rocky (stop bot)

Done. Try to talk with rocky about internet game. The discussion content is shown below.

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

First of all, I have wake up rocky by the act rocky command.

My findings are:

• All conversation should be inside "" sign in order for rocky to understand.
• Rocky will ask random question to me.
• When I answer Rocky's question, Rocky will take the keyword of my answer to create another question.
• Moreover, Rocky will try to base on my positive/negative keyword (YES/NO) to predict my thinking.
• Some answer from Rocky is very reasonable (like a human), but most of them are not human like.
• Rocky likes Python
• Rocky has a small brain - question repeat easily.