Exercise 14 : Searching mechanisms, virtual worlds and cyberagents

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

A spider (a.k.a web crawler) is a type of bot or software agent that automatically indexes web pages for internet search engines. Spiders may also be used to perform hyperlink validation.


2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

Nwana describes the following software agent types:
• Collaborative agents
• Interface agents
• Mobile agents
• Information agents
• Reactive agents
• Hybrid agents
• Heterogeneous agents
• Smart agents

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

Wikipedia gives the following examples of intelligent software agents:
• Buyer agents (shopping bots)
• User agents (personal agents)
• Monitoring-and-surveillance (predictive) agents
• Data mining agents

4. Computing ethics and bot programming case study: rocky

1. Get an account username and password from the lecturer to LC_MOO and login to the Welcome Lobby.
2. Hold a 5-minute discussion with Rocky on a special topic. Commands and chat are entered in the command box (bottom-left of screen) : act rocky (start bot) hush rocky (stop bot)
3. Rocky is an ELIZA-like bot. Report your findings.

References:

ELIZA (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Software agents http://www.sce.carleton.ca/netmanage/docs/AgentsOverview/ao.html
Software agents (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent