Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation held jointly with the 4th Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN IV, in Berlin, Germany, in September 1996. The 103 revised papers presented in the volume were carefully selected from more than 160 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on basic concepts of evolutionary computation (EC), theoretical foundations of EC, modifications and extensions of evolutionary algorithms, comparison of methods, other metaphors, and applications of EC in a variety of areas like ML, NNs, engineering, CS, OR, and biology. The book has a comprehensive subject index.