1. What is a spider? What does it do?
A Spider is a program that reads web pages from a website and uses the hyper text links present in the web page to track another pages. It is also called as webcrawler since it crawls through web pages. Search Enginie such as Alta Vista uses web crawling technique to display results from various websites. Spider is also a type of bot or software agent which start with a list of URLs and identifies the hyperlink present in that URLs to go to another pages and also adds the links to its list of URLs called crawler frontier. URLs from the crawler frontier are visited recursively according to a set of policies.
Reference :
Web crawler. Wikipedia. 2010.Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retreived at May 21, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.
A software agent is a software that acts for a user or other program in a realationship of agency as authority to decide which action is appropriate. The lists of software agents are:
i. Buyer Agent: It travels around the internet retreiving information about goods and services. It is also know as shopping bots which works very effciently commodity products such as electronic components , Books etc.
ii. User Agent: Also know as personal agent which takes actions on behalf of youself. It can perform following list of tasks:
- Check your e-mail, sort it according to the user's order of preference, and alert you when important emails arrive.
- Play computer games as your opponent or patrol game areas for you.
- Assemble customized news reports for you. There are several versions of these, including newshub and CNN.
- Find information for you on the subject of your choice.
- Fill out forms on the Web automatically for you, storing your information for future reference
- Scan Web pages looking for and highlighting text that constitutes the "important" part of the information there etc.
iii. Monitorig and survillience Agent: Monitoring and Surveillance Agents are used to observe and report on equipment, usually computer systems. The agents may keep track of company inventory levels, observe competitors' prices and relay them back to the company, watch stock manipulation by insider trading and rumors, etc.
iv. Data Mining Agent: Data Mining agent uses information technology to find trends and patterns in an abundance of information from many different sources. The user can sort through this information in order to find whatever information they are seeking.
Reference :
Software Agent Wikipedia. 2010.Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retreived at May 24, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent
3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.
The various activities in e-commerce using software agents can be identified as:
i. Buyer Agent: Amazon.com,eBay.com is a good example of a shopping bot. The website will offer you a list of booksand stuffs that you might like to buy on the basis of what you're buying now and what you have bought in the past. It offers the goods and similar products according to your taste based on your searches or previously bought products.
ii. User Agent: The examples of user Agent could be Yahoo.com, msn.com, Google.com which customizes the mail according to preference, assembles news, play games etc
iii. Monitoring and Survillience Agent : Example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, and scheduling equipment ordering to keep costs down, as well as food storage facilities. These agents usually monitor complex computer networks that can keep track of the configuration of each computer connected to the network.
iv. Data Mining Agent: For example, a corporation may develop an agent to analyze economic trends. If the agent detects that consumers are becoming more conservative, it will alert management of the change. With this information in hand, management can better plan on how to produce, market, and sell its product. It will make all the process efficiently.
Reference:
Data Mining Agent. Wikipedia. 2010. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retreived at may 24, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining_agents
Software Agent. Wikipedia. 2010.Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retreived at May 24, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent
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.
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)
c. Rocky is an ELIZA-like bot. Report your findings.
I have logged into the LC_MOO Welcome Lobby as train15 user. First of all, there was an error saying that the chatting area is not enabled because of the browser does not support java. Hence I tried another browser and worked perfectly fine. The chatting area was displayed on the left hand side of the browser and hence to chat with 'Rocky' bot first I typed 'activate Rocky' and it responded as "Gee thanks for waking me up! I must have dozed off..". And i tried chatting with 'rocky' and it was giving random responses. I tried the command 'seewords Rocky', it displays list of all Keywords it uses to answer for a specific question or command.
Screen shots provided below:
Then i tried other commands such as 'addrandom Rocky' giving the result 'sorry, you must be the owner of Rocky to add a new word...'. Giving command 'news 1' it displays the first news present in the 'news' link (screenshot below):
Hence, i found out that rocky is a kind of 'Eliza bot' having some limitation on artificial intelligence and replies according to some random set of comments it has. It can also be termed as Artificial conversational entities, chatter bots, talk bots etc. Such kind of bots are very useful to do some repetitive task faster and efficiently like gaming bots, auction site bots etc.
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