Book excerpt: The set LNCS 2723 and LNCS 2724 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionaty Computation Conference, GECCO 2003, held in Chicago, IL, USA in July 2003. The 193 revised full papers and 93 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 417 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on a-life adaptive behavior, agents, and ant colony optimization; artificial immune systems; coevolution; DNA, molecular, and quantum computing; evolvable hardware; evolutionary robotics; evolution strategies and evolutionary programming; evolutionary sheduling routing; genetic algorithms; genetic programming; learning classifier systems; real-world applications; and search based softare engineering.