"So! What is a Robot?", He Asked.

I think of a robot as something that does a job for me with minimal input and direction. It just gets on with a job I can or could do, creating an outcome for me that is in some way desirable - and hopefully a lot better than I can achieve. The small vacuum cleaners that scuttle about houses picking up crumbs and working their way around the floors are a good example. This type of robot does a physical job. My interest lies in the type of robot that can do an intellectual task for me. Hence the evolution of the share trading robot.

Some might argue that its not really a robot because it has no reach into the physical world, no actuators to pick up and move things or sensors to perceive what is happening. This view of robots is dominated by the course robotics has taken in the mechanical handling world. There is a whole other aspect to robotics concerned with goals and decision making. In this world the processing and evaluation of data within the context of the robot's reason for existing is a whole separate field.

Converting raw data into meaningful information, then evaluating information within the context of a body of expertise in order to achieve an appropriate goal is where I currently sit. Our share trading robot has been designed as a platform for working with decision making and tackles some of the many issues involved with creating practical answers that work in the real world for real people.

I call our software a robot because it does most of its work on its own, it has a simple task to perform, goals to work towards, some liaison tasks and a means of measuring its own performance. Compare this with a typical PC software application. Mostly they are what is know in the trade as event driven. A 'user' sits in front of the computer and drives the application through a series of actions. Its the user's consciousness that is in control, co-ordinating events to reach a goal. Apart from the times the machine is busy doing processing the significant goal of the activity is controlled from outside the code. With a robot the goal lies embedded within the code. This is about as clear as I can be at the moment about why I call our software a robot. In operation the user rarely interracts with the software, in fact once it is set-up the robot's owner (a term I use for what is in effect the 'user' of the program) is able to benefit from the robot's autonomous behaviour.

For the trading robot this means the owner sees an increase in their net worth as a consequence of its activity - with very little input into the process. It goes around picking up crumbs of profit so it can compound large gains.