Thisvolumerecordstheproceedingsofthe?fthEuropeanconferenceonGenetic Programming(EuroGP2002)whichtookplaceinKinsale, IrelandonApril3 5, 2002, continuing an established tradition of yearly meetings among the most prominent researchers on Genetic Programming in Europe and beyond; their proceedings have always been published in the LNCS series by Springer-Verlag. EuroGP began life in Paris in 1998 as an international workshop (April 14 15, LNCS 1391); a second workshop took place in G] oteborg in 1999 (May 26 27, LNCS 1598). Its ?rst appearance as a conference was in the year 2000 in Edinburgh...

The volume presents 22 revised full papers carefully selected for inclusion together with an invited survey on the state-of-the-art in scatter search by Fred Glover. The papers are organized in topical sections on genetic-algorithm operators, applications in various areas, theoretical issues, methodologies, and evolvable hardware and robotics.

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 N DEGREES ?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...