Topic 10 Exercise 14

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

A spider is an automated software which has been designed to "crawl" the Internet in search for new websites which upon finding are being indexed and cataloged for future rapid retrieval. Search companies e.g. Google use spiders to keep abreast of new sites and thus increase accuracy of their search results. They detect new or updated sites. 

2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

A software agent is a piece of software that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency. Such "action on behalf of" implies the authority to decide which (and if) action is appropriate. These include Intelligent agents (in particular exhibiting some aspect of Artificial Intelligence, such as learning and reasoning), autonomous agents (capable of modifying the way in which they achieve their objectives), distributed agents (being executed on physically distinct computers), multi-agent systems (distributed agents that do not have the capabilities to achieve an objective alone and thus must communicate), and mobile agents (agents that can relocate their execution onto different processors).

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

Buyer agent or shopping bots will search all the Internet and will gather information about goods and services. The most classic examples is that of Amazon.com. While buying books or CDs at this site, a list of related book or CDs will be offered that the buyer might consider to buy as well as related products that other buyers have purchased which selecting the same product from the catalog. 

4. Rocky - computing ethics and bot programming case study

Unfortunately, I was unable to conduct a virtual conversation with Rocky as advised in the Study Guide. I used a number of options given to us from the train 1-20 user name and password options with no luck in Opera (my default browser) with a message that the login and password are incorrect. I tried IE version 8 and managed to log in, however, I was not able to communicate with Rocky - the left half of the screen was empty when clicked on Rocky  - ELIZA-like bot.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler accessed on 22/05/2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent accessed on 20/05/2010