RoboCup is an international initiative devoted to advancing the state of the art in artificial intelligence and robotics. The ultimate, long range goal is to build a team of robot soccer players that can beat a human World Cup champion team.This is the first book devoted to RoboCup. It opens with an overview section presenting the history of this young initiative, motivation, the overall perspectives and challenges, and a survey of the state of the art in the area. The technical paper section presents the state of the art of the interdisciplinary research and development efforts in details, essentially building on the progress achieved during the RoboCup-97 Workshop. The team description contributions discuss technical and strategic aspects of the work of the participating teams.

1 Introduction Imagine a virtual world with digital creatures that looks like real life, sounds like real life, and even feels like real life. Imagine a virtual world not only with nice three dimensional graphics and animations, but also with realistic physical laws and forces. This virtual world could be familiar, reproducing some parts of our reality, or unfa miliar, with strange “physical” laws and artificial life forms. As a researcher interested in the sciences of complexity, the idea of a conference about virtual worlds emerged from frustration. In the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in the design of artificial environments using image synthesis and virtual reality. The emergence of industry standards such as VRML [1] is an illustra tion of this growing interest. At the same time, the field of Artificial Life has ad dressed and modeled complex phenomena such as self organization, reproduction, development, and evolution of artificial life like systems [2]. One of the most popular works in this field has been Tierra designed by Tom Ray: an environment producing synthetic organisms based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the “energy” resource and memory is the “material” resource [3]. Memory is or ganized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self replication. Muta tion generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different creatures compete for CPU time and memory space.

PRICAI 2000, held in Melbourne, Australia, is the sixth Pacific Rim Interna tional Conference on Artificial Intelligence and is the successor to the five earlier PRICAIs held in Nagoya (Japan), Seoul (Korea), Beijing (China), Cairns (Aus tralia) and Singapore in the years 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998 respectively. PRICAI is the leading conference in the Pacific Rim region for the presenta tion of research in Artificial Intelligence, including its applications to problems of social and economic importance. The objectives of PRICAI are: To provide a forum for the introduction and discussion of new research results, concepts and technologies; To provide practising engineers with exposure to and an evaluation of evolving research, tools and practices; To provide the research community with exposure to the problems of practical applications of AI; and To encourage the exchange of AI technologies and experience within the Pacific Rim countries. PRICAI 2000 is a memorial event in the sense that it is the last one in the 20"" century. It reflects what researchers in this region believe to be promising for their future AI research activities. In fact, some salient features can be seen in the papers accepted. We have 12 papers on agents, while PRICAI 96 and 98 had no more than two or three. This suggests to us one of the directions in which AI research is going in the next century. It is true that agent research provides us with a wide range of research subjects from basic ones to applications.