Exercise 14: Searching mechanisms, virtual worlds and cyberagents

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

    Spider is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The Spiders are typically programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their owners as new or updated. Entire sites or specific pages can be selectively visited and indexed. Spiders are called spiders because they usually visit many sites in parallel at the same time, their “legs” spanning a large area of the “web.” Spiders can crawl through a site’s pages in several ways.

 References

Tech Target. (n.d.). Cloud/Internet Technology. Retrieved May 25, 2010, from Whatis.com techtarget Search: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213035,00.html

    2.   Differentiate the various types of software agents.

Ø  Collaborative Agents

Ø  Interface Agents

Ø  Mobile Agents

Ø  Information Agents

Ø  Reactive Agents

Ø  Reactive Agents

Ø  Hybrid Agents

Ø  Heterogeneous Agent Systems

Ø  Smart Agents

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

      If you notice entries like Teleprot Pro and WebStripper in your traffic reports, someone’s been busy attempting to download your web site. You don’t have to just sit back and let this happen. If you are commercially hosted, you’ll have to just sit back and let this happen. If you are commercially hosted, you’ll be able to add a couple of lines to your robots.txt file to prevent repeat offenders from stripping your site.

    The robots.txt file gives search engine spiders and agents direction by informing them what directories and files they are allowed to examine and retrieve. These rules are called The Robots Exclusion Standard.

References:

Bloch, M. (n.d.). Robots, Agents and Spiders - Identifying Search Engine Crawlers. Retrieved may 22, 2010, from Taming the Beast: http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles2/search-engine-spiders.htm

 4. Computing ethics and bot programming case study:  rocky

Rocky is an ELIZA-like bot.

This was the most funny part of assignments and found is like i am not doing my study, i had check the question twice to making myself sure that yes i understand the question right below are my findings.

train1 activates Rocky.

Rocky says, "Gee thanks for waking me up! I must have dozed off.."

You say, "Hello"

Rocky says, "Do you have any hobbies?"

You say, "Watching football mate"

Rocky says, "What exactly are we talking about?"

You say, "i think you don’t know who is maradona, Do you?"

Rocky says, "You think you don’t know who is maradona Do me? Why?"

You say, "oh my mistake"

Rocky says, "Is your mistake important to you?"

You say, "you are like a baby"

You say, "i love baby"

Rocky [to train1]: Why do you think I am like baby?

Rocky says, "Why do you say you love me?"

I don't understand that.

You say, "because you just react like a baby"

Rocky says, "What are you like at programming in Python?"

You say, "i would rather working in JAVA than working in Python"

Rocky says, "Um, i get the feeling this conversation is not going anywhere.."

I don't understand that.

You say, "me too"

Rocky says, "Where'd you think up a name like 'train1' anyway?"

You say, "so why dont we stop what you think?"

Rocky says, "I like the way you bring up such great topics to discuss.."

You say, "okk than good bye"

Rocky [to train1]: Goodbye, catch ya later

You say, "have a nice day"