In den letzten 20 Jahren sind Evaluationen Schritt für Schritt zu einem festen und gleichzeitig kontrovers diskutierten Bestandteil politischer Förderung geworden. Auf der Basis langjähriger Beobachtungen der Evaluationspraxis des Förderprogramms „Soziale Stadt“ zeigt dieses Buch zunächst, dass Evaluationstätigkeiten in Ministerien, Kommunalverwaltungen und Planungsbüros mit ganz unterschiedlichen Erwartungen, Herausforderungen, Widersprüchen und Irritationen verknüpft werden. Evaluationen werden dabei sowohl als Hoffnungsträger, als auch als Schreckgespenst gesehen. Der Autor nimmt diese Beobachtungen zum Anlass, den Umgang mit Evaluationen in politischen Organisationen kritisch zu hinterfragen und systematisch zu erklären. Reduziert auf die Frage „Wozu Evaluation?“ wird auf der Basis eines systemtheoretischen Zugangs erklärt, welche unterschiedlichen Funktionen Evaluationen in Organisationen erfüllen können. Vertiefend wird dabei auf organisationales Lernen, auf politische Steuerungslogik und auf die Notwendigkeit von Symbolisierungen eingegangen. / The neighborhood development program “Social City” aims to discontinue the downward tendency of so-called disadvantaged neighborhoods by funding numerous projects. In the course of the program implementation, the method of evaluation – as a target-performance analysis – becomes more and more relevant. But whether something can be called a successful neighborhood management or a successful measure of integration strongly depends on its context and the point of view. For this reason evaluation research says that the effects of programs are usually only indicated unsatisfactorily. These observations lead to the research aim, to explain the function of evaluations for the constitution of development programs beyond usual arguments of effectiveness and efficiency. Using a system theoretical approach Wilhelm analyzed the explicit and implicit norms and observation schemes of a successful program implementation. The following theses on the role of evaluations in program implementations can be derived: a) Evaluations lay down the change in the distinctions of political intervention and facilitate communication about success,b) Evaluations manifest the differentiation between underprivileged and privileged neighborhoods in the program and help to legitimate it, c) evaluations actualize the funding programs’ ability to absorb insecurity and finally d) evaluations take the “illusion of control” inherent to every political strategy of intervention as a basis and thus contribute to its manifestation.

While in traditional computer game playing agents were designed solely for the purpose of playing one single game, General Game Playing is concerned with agents capable of playing classes of games. Given the game's rules and a few minutes time, the agent is supposed to play any game of the class and eventually win it. Since the game is unknown beforehand, previously optimized data structures or human-provided features are not applicable. Instead, the agent must derive a strategy on its own. One approach to obtain such a strategy is to analyze the game rules and create a state evaluation function that can be subsequently used to direct the agent to promising states in the match. In this thesis we will discuss existing methods and present a general approach on how to construct such an evaluation function. Each topic is discussed in a modular fashion and evaluated along the lines of quality and efficiency, resulting in a strong agent.:Introduction Game Playing Evaluation Functions I - Aggregation Evaluation Functions II - Features General Evaluation Related Work Discussion