Abstract Evolvable Components: From Theory to Hardware Implementations Lukáš Sekanina   a book in the Natural Computing Series published by Springer-Verlag Copyright© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg   This book deals with adaptive evolvable systems operating in a changing environment. The proposed component approach for the design of evolvable systems, the mathematical theory of evolvable machines, and the idea of virtual reconfigurable circuits have opened a way towards a better understanding of evolvable systems and to the design of more adaptive, competitive and innovative engineering products. In particular, topics such as the computational power of evolvable systems, the design of complex human-competitive digital circuits and the implementation of a one-clock partial reconfiguration in a common field-programmable gate array are introduced, investigated and implemented. The application domain is the adaptive image preprocessing.