Genetic Programming

In this volume we present the accepted contributions for the 7th European C- ference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2004). The conference took place on 5–7 April 2004 in Portugal at the University of Coimbra, in the Department of Mathematics in Pra¸ ca Dom Dinis, located on the hill above the old town. EuroGP is a well-established conference and the sole one exclusively de- ted to Genetic Programming. Previous proceedings have all been published by Springer-Verlag in the LNCS series. EuroGP began as an international wor- hop in Paris, France in 1998 (14–15 April, LNCS 1391). Subsequently the wor- hop was held in G¨ oteborg, Sweden in 1999 (26–27 May, LNCS 1598) and then EuroGP became an annual conference: in 2000 in Edinburgh, UK (15–16 April, LNCS 1802), in 2001 at Lake Como, Italy (18–19 April, LNCS 2038), in 2002 in Kinsale, Ireland (3–5 April, LNCS 2278), and in 2003 in Colchester, UK (14–16 April, LNCS 2610). From the outset, there have always been specialized wor- hops, co-located with EuroGP, focusing on applications of evolutionary al- rithms (LNCS 1468, 1596, 1803, 2037, 2279, and 2611). This year the EvoCOP workshop on combinatorial optimization transformed itself into a conference in its own right, and the two conferences, together with the EvoWorkshops, EvoBIO, EvoIASP, EvoMUSART, EvoSTOC, EvoHOT, and EvoCOMNET, now form one of the largest events dedicated to Evolutionary Computation in Europe.