Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2004, held in Birmingham, UK, in September 2004. The 119 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 358 submissions. The papers address all current issues in biologically inspired computing; they are organized in topical sections on theoretical and foundational issues, new algorithms, applications, multi-objective optimization, co-evolution, robotics and multi-agent systems, and learning classifier systems and data mining.