Exercise 24

Exercise 24:
1. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

The different type of agents are:
• Collaborative agents
• Interface agents
• Mobile agents
• Information/Internet agents
• Reactive agents
• Hybrid agents
• Smart Agents

A collaborative agents emphasise autonomy and cooperation (with other agents) in order to perform tasks for their owners.

A Interface agents emphasise autonomy and learning in order to perform tasks for their owners.

A Mobile agents are computational software processes capable of roaming wide area networks (WANs) such as the WWW, interacting with foreign hosts, gathering information on behalf of its owner and coming back home having performed the duties set by its user

A Information agents perform the role of managing, manipulating or collating information from many distributed sources.

A Reactive agents are very simple and do not have internal models of their environment. Rather, they react to stimuli within then environment in which they exist.

A hybrid agents refer to those whose constitution is a combination of two or more agent philosophies within a singular agent. These philosophies include a mobile philosophy, an interface agent philosophy, collaborative agent philosophy, etc.

A heterogeneous agent system may also contain one or more hybrid agents

(Nwana, 1996)

2.Describe how techniques such as artificial intelligence and statistical techniques are used in software agents.

Artificial intelligence refers to the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.many software sgents are developed which have AI and they are referde to as Intelligent agents. Some examples of these agents include the "BargainFinder Agent" and Cyber Yenta, which perform searches for the user. The first is incredibly simpleminded and and the latter an incredibly simplified version of the original MIT Yenta work/, which is still in progress. The claim to intelligence here is basically string matching. Along the same lines, but somewhat more "AIish", CompassWare offers an Intelligent News Filter that parses natural language to perform a search. (Petrie, 1996 )
3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.
As said by Maria Gini some problem of e-commerce which software agents can sole easily are:
• Procurement: obtaining materials, services. managing inflow into the organization towards the end user.
• Brokering Services: finding information about products, sellers, and prices, providing protection for privacy, validating purchasers credit, billing and accounting, etc.
• Digital Libraries and Recommending Services: retrieving information from distributed sources, filtering information on contents, collaborative filtering.
• Notification Services: notifying of new books or CDs, notifying when specific products are available at a specific price.
(Gini, 1999)
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.

The username used is train5 and the password is train5.

b. Hold a 5-minute discussion with Rocky on a special topic. Commands act rocky (start bot) hush rocky (stop bot)

when i initiated act rockey command it gave me this message
train5 activates Rocky.
Rocky says, "Gee thanks for waking me up! I must have dozed off.."

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

ELIZA was a computer program and primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts.it have a list of predefined answer to various responses of the user.one of the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist.