Hans-Georg Beyer - Böcker

The two volume set LNCS 3102/3103 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2004, held in Seattle, WA, USA, in June 2004.The 230 revised full papers and 104 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 460 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial life, adaptive behavior, agents, and ant colony optimization; artificial immune systems, biological applications; coevolution; evolutionary robotics; evolution strategies and evolutionary programming; evolvable hardware; genetic algorithms; genetic programming; learning classifier systems; real world applications; and search-based software engineering.

The two volume set LNCS 3102/3103 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2004, held in Seattle, WA, USA, in June 2004.The 230 revised full papers and 104 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 460 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial life, adaptive behavior, agents, and ant colony optimization; artificial immune systems, biological applications; coevolution; evolutionary robotics; evolution strategies and evolutionary programming; evolvable hardware; genetic algorithms; genetic programming; learning classifier systems; real world applications; and search-based software engineering.

We are very pleased to present this LNCS volume, the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN IX). PPSNisoneofthemostrespectedandhighlyregardedconferenceseriesinevo- tionary computation and natural computing / computation. This biennial event was ?rst held in Dortmund in 1990, and then in Brussels (1992), Jerusalem (1994), Berlin (1996), Amsterdam (1998), Paris (2000), Granada (2002), and Birmingham(2004).PPSNcontinuestobetheconferenceofchoicebyresearchers all over the world, who value its high quality. We received 255 paper submissions this year. After an extensive peer review process involving more than 1000 reviews, the programme committee selected the top 106 papers for inclusion in this volume and, of course, for presentation at the conference. This represents an acceptance rate of 42%. The papers included in this volume cover a wide range of topics, from e- lutionary computation to swarm intelligence and from bio-inspired computing to real-world applications. They represent some of the latest and best research in evolutionary and natural computation. Following the PPSN tradition, all - pers at PPSN IX were presented as posters. There were 7 sessions: each session consisting of around 15 papers. For each session, we covered as wide a range of topics as possible so that participants with di?erent interests could ?nd some relevant papers in every session.

The set LNCS 2723 and LNCS 2724 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionaty Computation Conference, GECCO 2003, held in Chicago, IL, USA in July 2003.The 193 revised full papers and 93 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 417 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on a-life adaptive behavior, agents, and ant colony optimization; artificial immune systems; coevolution; DNA, molecular, and quantum computing; evolvable hardware; evolutionary robotics; evolution strategies and evolutionary programming; evolutionary sheduling routing; genetic algorithms; genetic programming; learning classifier systems; real-world applications; and search based softare engineering.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 5th Annual Genetic and EvolutionaryComputationConference(GECCO2003).Theconferencewasheld in Chicago, USA, July 12-16, 2003. A total of 417 papers were submitted to GECCO 2003. After a rigorous doubleblind reviewing process, 194 papers were accepted for full publication and oral presentation at the conference, resulting in an acceptance rate of 46.5%. An additional 92 submissions were accepted as posters with two-page extended abstracts included in these proceedings. This edition of GECCO was the union of the 8th Annual Genetic Progr- mingConference(whichhasmetannuallysince1996)andthe12thInternational Conference on Genetic Algorithms (which, with its ?rst meeting in 1985, is the longest running conference in the ?eld). Since 1999, these conferences have m- ged to produce a single large meeting that welcomes an increasingly wide array of topics related to genetic and evolutionary computation. Possibly the most visible innovation in GECCO 2003 was the publication of theproceedingswithSpringer-VerlagaspartoftheirLectureNotesinComputer Science series.This will make the proceedings available in many libraries as well asonline,wideningthedisseminationoftheresearchpresentedattheconference. OtherinnovationsincludedanewtrackonCoevolutionandArti?cialImmune Systems and the expansion of the DNA and Molecular Computing track to include quantum computation. In addition to the presentation of the papers contained in these proceedings, the conference included 13 workshops, 32 tutorials by leading specialists, and presentation of late-breaking papers. GECCO is sponsored by the International Society for Genetic and Evolut- nary Computation (ISGEC). The ISGEC by-laws contain explicit guidance on the organization of the conference, including the following principles: (i)GECCOshouldbeabroad-basedconferenceencompassingthewhole?eld of genetic and evolutionary computation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature,PPSN 2002, held in Granada, Spain in September 2002. The 90 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 181 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on evolutionary algorithms theory, representation and codification, variation operators, evolutionary techniques and coevolution, multiobjective optimization, new techniques for evolutionary algorithms, hybrid algorithms, learning classifier systems, implementation of evolutionary algorithms, applications, and cellular automata and ant colony optimization.

Evolutionary Algorithms, in particular Evolution Strategies, Genetic Algorithms, or Evolutionary Programming, have found wide acceptance as robust optimization algorithms in the last ten years. Compared with the broad propagation and the resulting practical prosperity in different scientific fields, the theory has not progressed as much. This monograph provides the framework and the first steps toward the theoretical analysis of Evolution Strategies (ES). The main emphasis is on understanding the functioning of these probabilistic optimization algorithms in real-valued search spaces by investigating the dynamical properties of some well-established ES algorithms. The book introduces the basic concepts of this analysis, such as progress rate, quality gain, and self-adaptation response, and describes how to calculate these quantities. Based on the analysis, functioning principles are derived, aiming at a qualitative understanding of why and how ES algorithms work.