Artificial evolution

The Arti? cial Evolution conference was originally conceived as a forum for the French-speaking Evolutionary Computation community, but has of late been acquiring an European audience, with several papers from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain... However, AE remains as intended a small and friendly gathering, which will continue to be held every two years. Previous AE meets were held in Toulouse, Brest, and Nˆ ? mes. This year, the hosting was done by the LIL (Laboratoire d’Informatique du Littoral) in the not-so-cold city of Dunkerque. The invited talk on “Fitness Landscapes and Evolutionary Algorithms” was delivered by Colin Reeves of Coventry University This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference. Twenty-seven papers were presented orally at the conference, selected from over 40 papers refereed by the program committee. After the conference, each p- sentation was reviewed and 20 papers were retained and revised for publication in this volume. The papers in this volume have been grouped into the following ? ve sections which more or less re? ect the organization of the oral presentations. 1. Invited Paper: C. Reeves brightly describes the state of the art in Fitness Landscapes.