John A. Bullinaria & Edmund Burke 
Parallel Problem Solving from Nature — PPSN VIII 
8th International Conference, Birmingham, UK, September 18-22, 2004, Proceedings

We are very pleased to present this LNCS volume, the proceedings of the 8th International Conferenceon Parallel Problem Solvingfrom Nature(PPSNVIII). PPSN is one of the most respected and highly regarded conference series in evolutionary computation and natural computing/computation. This biennial eventwas?rstheldin Dortmundin1990, andthenin Brussels(1992), Jerusalem (1994), Berlin (1996), Amsterdam (1998), Paris (2000), and Granada (2002). PPSN VIII continues to be the conference of choice by researchers all over the world who value its high quality. We received a record 358 paper submissions this year. After an extensive peer review process involving more than 1100 reviews, the programme c- mittee selected the top 119 papers for inclusion in this volume and, of course, for presentation at the conference. This represents an acceptance rate of 33%. Please note that review reports with scores only but no textual comments were not considered in the chairs’ ranking decisions. 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 — persat PPSNVIII werepresentedasposters.Therewere7 sessions:eachsession consisting of around 17 papers. For each session, we covered as wide a range of topics as possible so that participants with di?erent interests would ?nd some relevant papers at every session.