An introduction to the third volume

Welcome to the third volume of Advances in Genetic Programming series. The Genetic Programming (GP) field has matured considerably since the first two volumes were produced in conjunction with workshops held at the International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) [kinnear:book,book:1996:aigp2]. During the 1993 and 1995 ICGA conferences the interest in GP was strong but within this broader community there were only a few presentation and publication slots for GP work. The Advances volumes therefore provided an important outlet for creative new work in GP. Interest in GP continued to grow and there is now a separate annual conference on GP in the USA, as well as a European workshop on GP and several other conferences that regularly feature GP themes (see Section 1.2).