This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Evolvable Systems, ICES 2003, held in Trondheim, Norway in March 2003.

The 41 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on evolution, fault tolerance and fault recovery, evolutionary development, POEtic tissue and circuits, applications, evolution of digital circuits, hardware challenges, evolutionary hardware, neural systems, logic design, evolution strategies, and future technologies.