GECCO

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 8th Annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference (GECCO-2006), held in Seattle, Washington, USA., July 8-12, 2006.In our second year sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO), we've seen a further evolution of the field toward practical importance. Although the main genetic algorithm track remains the largest in the number of submitted papers, the real world applications track is starting to close the gap rapidly. As an ACM publication, the GECCO-2006 proceedings are available online in the ACM Digital Library. This guarantees a broader dissemination of Darwinian and other nature-inspired computation methods, and will likely increase the relevance of the field even further.A total of 446 papers were submitted to 15 separate tracks, with 205 (46%) accepted as full, eight-page papers for publication and oral presentation. Double-blind reviews were conducted by over 400 reviewers. On average, each paper was evaluated by four reviewers. In addition, 143 papers were accepted as posters with two-page abstracts included in the proceedings.With 10 workshops, 32 tutorials, sessions in Evolutionary Computation in Practice, late-breaking papers, awards in human-competitive results, GECCO-2006 has lived up to its motto of one conference, many mini-conferences. Also this year's GECCO thrives on diversity.