Should the PPA accept membership/backing from bot providers/users?

[indianaV8]

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Defending botting is tantamount to actually cheating. Saying that decent people should associate with them at all is sick. Botrunners are on a par with DOS botnet operators, child pornographers, and FoF shills. Anywhere they show up they should be hounded away, immediately. Its like including the Klan at the DOJ's civil right's office.

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I'm curious from where you came with that opinion. Just a week or two ago I've seen a guy interviewed on NBC talking about his stock market bot "bobo" or something like this, and I got zero impression of anyone having any issue with that, what about whatever pornography.

Although I have no any clue of how accepted are bots on the stock markets, from game theory point of view it is similar problem.

Maybe we do not use the same meaning for botting - many people mix up botting with multi-account collusion, or other multi acount abuses, which gives to the operator advantage (from game theory POV).

[indianaV8]

I don't know if I'm stepping on someone too, but you need to make your claims more clear, is it that
1) botting is criminal
2) botting is cheating defined by "breaking a service agreement"
3) botting is cheating defined by "breaking a common denominator moral"
etc.

1 is obviously not the case.

W.r.t. 3):
If you like, you may have a look at how Darse Billing, the FullTilt advisor or employee (that is information I got in the 2+2 poker theory forums, I don't know it is true for sure) is talking about poker botting. What is for sure is that a long term poker bot researcher (Aaron Davidson, the author of poki) is now working FullTilt software too. But back to Darse, and what he is writting (just in the last one week):

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In general, it is not a good idea to stay too far from the real game. The academic research should stay grounded in real problems. For the same reason, i suggest moving away from Doyle's game and on to the real NL game with varying stack sizes. <...> Finally, perhaps we should start a discussion of what [poker bot] events should be added in future years. <...>

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He (and the other "cheaters") are talking about what the rules of the 2008 poker bot scientific competition should be.

Hence only 2) remains, which you already ruled out.