This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third European Conference on Artificial Evolution, AE '97, held in Nimes, France, in October 1997. The volume presents 22 revised full papers carefully selected for inclusion together with an invited survey on the state-of-the-art in scatter search by Fred Glover. The papers are organized in topical sections on genetic-algorithm operators, applications in various areas, theoretical issues, methodologies, and evolvable hardware and robotics.

This volume presents a collection of revised refereed papers selected from the contributions presented at the European Conference on Artificial Evolution, AE '95, held in Brest, France, in September 1995; also included are a few papers from the predecessor conference, AE '94.
Besides two invited surveys on evolution strategies and evolutionary programming, 24 full papers are presented. They are grouped into sections on evolutionary computation theory, genetic algorithm techniques, coevolution, neural networks, image processing, and applications to various optimization and other problems.

This work demonstrates that theorem-proving methods can lead to program synthesis and algorithm implementation by using pairs of logic laws: a deductive law for proving the theorem and a constructive law for synthesizing the program or algorithm. A systematic examination of deductive laws and of constructive laws is presented. The set of all possible pairs of laws provides us with a tool for classifying the different approaches for materializing algorithms (such as hardware, microprogramming, algorithmic programming, declarative programming, deductive approach for recursive routines).