In this volume we present the accepted contributions for the 7th European C- ference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2004). The conference took place on 5 7 April 2004 in Portugal at the University of Coimbra, in the Department of Mathematics in Pra, ca Dom Dinis, located on the hill above the old town. EuroGP is a well-established conference and the sole one exclusively de- ted to Genetic Programming. Previous proceedings have all been published by Springer-Verlag in the LNCS series. EuroGP began as an international wor- hop in Paris, France in 1998 (14 15 April, LNCS 1391). Subsequently the wor- hop was held in G] oteborg, Sweden in 1999 (26 27 May, LNCS 1598) and then EuroGP became an annual conference: in 2000 in Edinburgh, UK (15 16 April, LNCS 1802), in 2001 at Lake Como, Italy (18 19 April, LNCS 2038), in 2002 in Kinsale, Ireland (3 5 April, LNCS 2278), and in 2003 in Colchester, UK (14 16 April, LNCS 2610). From the outset, there have always been specialized wor- hops, co-located with EuroGP, focusing on applications of evolutionary al- rithms (LNCS 1468, 1596, 1803, 2037, 2279, and 2611). This year the EvoCOP workshop on combinatorial optimization transformed itself into a conference in its own right, and the two conferences, together with the EvoWorkshops, EvoBIO, EvoIASP, EvoMUSART, EvoSTOC, EvoHOT, and EvoCOMNET, now form one of the largest events dedicated to Evolutionary Computation in Europe."

Research on general video game playing aims at designing agents or content generators that can perform well in multiple video games, possibly without knowing the game in advance and with little to no specific domain knowledge. The general video game AI framework and competition propose a challenge in which researchers can test their favorite AI methods with a potentially infinite number of games created using the Video Game Description Language. The open-source framework has been used since 2014 for running a challenge. Competitors around the globe submit their best approaches that aim to generalize well across games. Additionally, the framework has been used in AI modules by many higher-education institutions as assignments, or as proposed projects for final year (undergraduate and Master's) students and Ph.D. candidates. The present book, written by the developers and organizers of the framework, presents the most interesting highlights of the research performed by the authors during these years in this domain. It showcases work on methods to play the games, generators of content, and video game optimization. It also outlines potential further work in an area that offers multiple research directions for the future.