Re: defining "robot"

David M Banes (dbanes@ozemail.com.au)
Fri, 22 Nov 1996 17:52:24 +1100

HipCrime wrote:
>
> Erik Selberg <selberg@cs.washington.edu> wrote:
>
> > True, although by adding categories, we can define "robot" as
> > anything non-human, e.g. proxies, page watchers, indexers, etc.
>
> By that definition, Netscape Navigator and any other hypertext
> browser is "non-human". How much human interaction with the
> program is required, to define its actions as "human"? Or, how
> much autonomy must a program be allowed, for it to be defined as
> "robotic"?
>
> This is another important issue. And, it must be addressed
> *before* any kind of "standard" can be discussed, much less
> applied and adhered to.
>
> ... Robert

How about this for a simple idea.

If a human is controlling an application it's not a robot, if the
application is controlling itself, either by script, search algorithm or
whatever then it's a robot.

Or, a robot(application) thats controlled by a human isn't a robot, it's
a puppet. Only when you animate it does it become a robot.

And, no I'm not suggesting a 'puppets.txt'. :)

David

-- 
[--------------------------------------------------------------------]
 email:dbanes@ozemail.com.au       CServe - 100446.102@compuserve.com 
 http://www.ozemail.com.au/~dbanes MSN    - banes@msn.com
[--------------------------------------------------------------------]


_________________________________________________
This messages was sent by the robots mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail
to robots-request@webcrawler.com with the word "unsubscribe" in the body.
For more info see http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html