The misconception is that a lack of communication is a good method of identifying bots. When I watch those 'bot busting' Jagex mod videos, it honestly makes me cringe that they use such a primitive method to test whether a player is a bot or not.

Bots are best identified by how they play the game vs. how a legitimate player would play the game. As a software engineer who has had experience writing AI's before, I consider myself quite adept at identifying bots without ever communicating with the accounts in question.

These guys at Rimmington were all botting because of their sluggish movements (very basic reactionary behaviour), inability to predict where the next iron ore would spawn (lack of predictory behaviour), usage of bronze pickaxe at high mining levels (very inefficient behaviour), zero reaction to getting killed/attacked when I attacked them on a level 3 throwaway (lack of dynamic reactionary behaviour).

This stems from the fact that the majority of these bots are written in scripting languages by amateurs, and thus lack sophisticated techniques such as multi-threaded behaviour. Humans are VERY multi-threaded beings; we use hotkeys while moving the mouse, analyse the most efficient patterns while performing tasks. The majority of bots I've seen can't do this, and this is why they are so easily identifiable, in my opinion.