This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference, COCOON'97, held in Shanghai, China, in August 1997.The volume presents 53 revised full papers selected from a total of 106 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on parallel and distributed computing, computational geometry, complexity, computational biology, computability, cryptography and computational finance, graph algorithms, algorithms, rewriting and logic, algorithms and applications, automata languages and complexity, and mathematical programming and genetic algorithms.