Genetic Programming 9th European Conference, EuroGP 2006, Budapest, Hungary, April 10-12, 2006. Proceedings

The present volume contains the contributions for the 9th European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2006). The conference took place during April 10-12, 2006 in Budapest, Hungary. EuroGP is a well-established conf- ence and the only one exclusively devoted to genetic programming worldwide. EuroGP began as a workshopin 1998 in Paris, and has been held annually since then,becomingaconferenceinEdinburghin2000.Allpreviousproceedingshave been published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. More recently, EuroGP has been co-located with EvoCOP 2006, the 6th Eu- pean Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, and the EvoWorkshops, focusing on applications of evolutionary computation, resulting in the largest combined event dedicated to evolutionary computation in Europe. Genetic programming (GP) is evolutionary computation that solves complex problems or tasks by evolving and adapting a population of computer programs, using Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics as its sources of inspiration. The 32 papers included in these proceedings address fundamental and theore- cal issues, along with a wide variety of papers dealing with di'erent application areas,suchascomputerscience,engineering,machinelearning,Kolmogorovc- plexity, biology and computational design, showing that GP is a powerful and practical problem-solving paradigm. A rigorous, double-blind, selection mechanism was applied to 59 submitted papers,thatresultedintheacceptanceof21plenarytalks(36%acceptancerate) and 11 poster presentations (54% global acceptance rate for talks and posters).