Experimental algorithmics, as its name indicates, combines algorithmic work and experimentation: algorithms are not just designed, but also implemented and tested on a variety of instances. Perhaps the most important lesson in this process is that designing an algorithm is but the first step in the process of developing robust and efficient software for applications.

Based on a seminar held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in September 2000, this state-of-the-art survey presents a coherent survey of the work done in the area so far. The 11 carefully reviewed chapters provide complete coverage of all current topics in experimental algorithmics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, SWAT 2002, held in Turku, Finland, in July 2002.The 43 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on scheduling, computational geometry, graph algorithms, robotics, approximation algorithms, data communication, computational biology, and data storage and manipulation.