This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference documentation of the First Asia-Pacific Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning, SEAL'96, held in Taejon, Korea, in November 1996. The 23 revised full papers were selected for inclusion in this book on the basis of 2 rounds of reviewing and improvements. Also included are invited papers by John L. Casti and Lawrence J. Fogel. The volume covers a wide range of current topics in simulated evolution and learning e.g. evolutionary optimization, evolutionary learning, artificial life, hybrid evolutionary fuzzy systems, evolutionary artificial neural networks, co-evolution, novel evolutionary approaches to computer tomography image reconstruction, power systems load flow control, and water flow control in cropped soils.