The Second International Conference in Genetic Programming (GP-97), like the first, was held on the beautiful Stanford University campus in California under the chairmanship of John Koza. More than 350 people from all over the world gathered together for four days to see presentations, posters, tutorials and trade presentations on a range of topics. In addition to GP and related topics in Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and classifier systems, the up and coming fields of evolvable hardware (EHW) and biocomputing (also called DNA computing) were also represented.