ATTACK! ATTACK! Robots ahoy...

Though not necessarily in name, robots have fascinated man for years. Just to make sure I wasn’t rambling on with nonsensical idiosyncratic nonsense, it seemed like a good idea to find a definition of the word “Robot”. From a quick search around and the dismissal of definitions that were too computer science specific an answer came from the depths of  a Canadian Business School.

[Quote url="http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~rsexty/business1000/glossary/R.htm"]
Robot:
a machine that can automatically do tasks normally controlled by humans and mostly is used to perform repetitive tasks on an assembly line.
[/Quote]

Wow, wasn’t that just a perfect definition of what a robot is? I thought so too :D. So onwards. So who are we to thank for the idea behind robots, surprisingly enough the Greeks [1,2]! So from these beginnings an industry was sprung. Why put together car after car after car when you can get a huge machine that has no feelings emotions and can work around the clock to do it? Once again human ingenuity, creativeness and the desire to as a little work as possible prevailed!

While(Year.date != 2006)
{
     Year.GetNext();
}

So what is a computer science equivalent of a bot? Something that we use most days and provides the human races with an indescribable amount of knowledge would be nigh on impossible without bots. And what pray tell am I speaking of? Search engines. Search engines use crawler bots[3] to grab pages in the internet, to some extent this is done in a brute force manner hitting every webpage possible grabbing and parsing the information.
Where lies good, lurks evil. Bots are not only used for the better good of man. Distributed bot nets, which constitute collections of owned [4] computers that are used to perform such this as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS [5]) attacks on servers throughout the world. To bots that help players of online poker cheat! Though how these bots deal with inherent randomness in the nature of humans and cards is another question unto itself!

So in conclusion bots are pretty damn neat, and provide the means to accomplish a lot of menial or repetitive tasks that would take a lifetime to perform by hand.