RoboCup is an international initiative devoted to advancing the state of the art in artificial intelligence and robotics. The aims of the project and potential research directions are numerous. The ultimate, long-range goal is to build a team of robot soccer players that can beat a human World Cup champion team. This book is the second official archival publication devoted to RoboCup. It documents the achievements presented at the Second International Workshop on RoboCup held in Paris, France, in July 1998. The book opens with an overview section, provides research papers on selected technical topics, and presents technical and strategic descriptions of the work of participating teams. Of interest far beyond the rapidly growing RoboCup community, this book is also indispensable reading for R&D professionals interested in multi-agent systems, distributed artificial intelligence, and intelligent robotics.

The work presents a modern, unified view on decision support and planning by considering its basics like preferences, belief, possibility and probability as well as utilities. These features together are immanent for software agents to believe the user that the agents are "intelligent".

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2001, held at Lake Como, Italy in April 2001. The 17 revised full papers and 13 research posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected during a rigorous double-blind refereeing process out of 42 submissions. All current aspects of genetic programming are addressed, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to applications in a variety of fields such as robotics, artificial retina, character recognition, financial prediction, digital filter and electronic circuit design, image processing, data fusion, and bio-sequencing.