Genetic programming

In this volume we present the contributions for the 18th European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2005). The conference took place from 30 March to 1 April in Lausanne, Switzerland. EuroGP is a well-established conf- ence and the only one exclusively devoted to genetic programming. All previous proceedings were published by Springer in the LNCS series. From the outset, EuroGP has been co-located with the EvoWorkshops focusing on applications of evolutionary computation. Since 2004, EvoCOP, the conference on evolutionary combinatorial optimization, has also been co-located with EuroGP, making this year’s combined events one of the largest dedicated to evolutionary computation in Europe. Genetic programming (GP) is evolutionary computation that solves complex problems or tasks by evolving and adapting a population of computer programs, using Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics as its sources of inspiration. Some of the 34 papers included in these proceedings address foundational and theoretical issues and there is also a wide variety of papers dealing with di? erent application areas, such as computer science, engineering, language processing, biology and computational design, demonstrating that GP is a powerful and practical problem-solving paradigm.