Exercise 24: Virtual business worlds and cyberagents

Search the Web for a site that uses a cyber character or cyber agent to host a business site. (If you create a successful cyber agent, you may be able to get large companies to use it to sell their products online.)

1. Differentiate the various types of software agents.
Software agent is a single software that works for a user or other program in a relationship of agency. The term 'agent' describes a software abstraction, an idea or a concept that similar to the methods, functions and objects in object oriented programming. The agent provides a easy and powerful way to describe a complex software entity that capable of working with a certain degree of autonomy in order to achieve tasks on behalf of its user. Various type of software agents (Wikipedia 2009):

• Intelligent software agents are a branch of artificial intelligence research. The intelligent agents include ability to adapt and learn. Ability to adapt means sensing the environment and reconfiguring in response by choice of alternative problem solving rules or algorithms.
• Autonomous agents are software agents that claim to be autonomous. It is self contained and capable of making independent decisions, and taking actions to satisfy self goals that upon their sense environment.
• Distributed agents are designed to be very loosely coupled and easy to execute as independent threads on distributed processors.
• Multi-agent systems are several agents work together or collaborate with other agents. Data is decentralized and execution is asynchronous in mult-agent systems.
• Mobile agents are agent that moves itself include its execution state from one to another machine to continue execution there. Mobile agents can be used to gather system information, taking files backup, monitoring network throughput or checking of available resources and moderating the resource utilization.
• Fuzzy agents are software agent that implements fuzzy logic. They interact with their environment through an adaptive rule-base and can be considered as a kind of intelligent agent.
  

Haag (Haag, 2006) suggest the following four essential types of intelligent software agents:

1. Buyer agents also called 'shopping bots', they search around the network to retrieve information about goods and services. The Website offer a list of products that you may like to buy such as Amazon.com or eBay.
2. User agents or personal agents are intelligent agents that take action on your behalf. They perform the tasks for you: check e-email, play computer games, assemble customized news reports, find information, fill out forms on the Web automatically, scan Web page and discuss topics with you.
3. Monitoring-and-surveillance(predictive) agents are used to observe and report on equipment, usually computer systems. They may keep track the inventory levels, price of competitors and relay them back to the company.
4. Data mining agents uses information technology to find trends and patterns in a abundance of information from many sources that come from different systems. Users can seek and sort the information in any way they want.
   

2. Describe how techniques such as artificial intelligence and statistical techniques are used in software agents.
The artificial intelligence technique is used in intelligent software agents and Fuzzy agents for capable in ability to adapt and learn. The ability to adapt means sensing the environment and reconfiguring in response, through the select of alternative problem-solving-rules or algorithms, or through the discovery of problem solving strategies. The ability to learn means learning through trial-and-error, then capable to introspection and analysis of behavior and success, capable to abstract and generalize.

The statistical technique is used in mobile agents in gather system information, monitoring network throughput, check resources avaliablity and moderating the resource utilization. The statistical technique is used intensively in data mining agents for information collection and analysis.

3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.
Buyer agents are widely used in e-commerce such as Amazon.com and eBay. Their Website offer a list of products for users to buy. They also use the collaborative filtering technology to show similar products that customers who did the search looked at.

Data mining agents are also used e-commerce for collecting data to promote e-commerce activities. Data collect include the users' browsing history, keywords used in search engines and hit rate of Web page etc.

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: act rocky (start bot) hush rocky (stop bot)
c. Rocky is an ELIZA-like bot. Report your findings.

I had login the LC_MOO, activate Rocky and tell with him. Although the answers and the questions of Rocky are not very logical, I still feel like talking with some one else.


Eliza first appeared in the year 60's. It is an automated psychoanalysis program based on the psychoanalysis program based on the psychoanalytic principle of repeating what the patient says and drawing introspection out the patient without adding content from the analyst. Some people actually mistook her for human. If the conversation is limit to talking about yourself and your like, the illusion of intelligence of Eliza work best. But computer program shouldn't be used as a substitute for a human function that requires interpersonal respect, understanding and love (Lee, 1997).

Reference

1. Hagg, S. (2006), Management information systems for the information age, 224-228.
2. Lee, J.A.N. (1997), Eliza, Retrieved at http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Ethics/eliza.html on 11th May, 2009.
   
3. Wikipedia (2009), Software agent, Retrieved at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent on 4th May, 2009.