Bot News
BOT2001 Begins Today

By Brian Proffitt

The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco will be abuzz today with terms not usually heard in its gilded rooms. Terms like bots, AI, and avatars--bandied about by the attendees of BOT2001.

Over 170 people are expected to attend today's seminar, which will cover topics ranging from a comparison of client-side and server-side bots, to using bots in the enterprise, to creating a freethinking, self-organizing neural architecture.

But what some participants are already talking about is how exactly to describe bots, intelligent agents, spiders, and all this related technology.

The term "bots" has been applied to a broad range of applications, which, to some, take the place of a human being in some manner. Peter Small, author of The Entrepreneurial Web, classifies a bot as an object in an object-oriented world that manipulates and gathers data for a database.

According to Small, who is speaking today, all intelligent agents, spiders, crawlers, and the like could be referred to as bots.

But bots, fellow conference speaker Dr. Steve Thaler says, are not true replacements for intelligent humans, because somewhere along the line, a human has to be involved in creating the code, whether it is a chat bot or an intelligent agent.

This is a question that will be addressed at the conference, and by attendees for a long time to come.