This is the fifteenth volume in the Machine Intelligence series, founded in 1965 by Donald Michie, and includes papers by a number of eminent AI figures including John McCarthy, Alan Robinson, Robert Kowalski and Mike Genesereth. The book is centred on the theme of intelligent agents andcovers a wide range of topics, including: - Representations of consciousness (John McCarthy, Stanford University and Donald Michie, Edinburgh University) - SoftBots (Bruce Blumberg, MIT Media Lab) - Parallel implementations of logic (Alan Robinson, Syracuse University) - Machine learning (StephenMuggleton, Oxford University) - Machine vision (Andrew Blake, Oxford University) - Machine-based scientific discovery in molecular biology (Mike Sternberg, Imperial Cancer Research Fund).