Artificial Evolution - 4th European Conference, AE'99 Dunkerque, France, November 3-5, 1999 Selected Papers

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.