> I wonder why evolutionary computation does not live up to the expectation? There's also a social factor here, I think. Neural networks were disregarded due t

> I wonder why evolutionary computation does not live up to the expectation? There's also a social factor here, I think. Neural networks were disregarded due to over-claims and also perhaps due to some bias for machine learning methods that relied on understandable statistical models. In the same way, evolutionary computing is often looked down upon by the rest of the AI community - it's a lot of hacking and hand waving and "try it and see". It doesn't help that there's been a lot of low-quality work in EC. But this bias has perhaps starved EC of talent somewhat; much of the progress in deep learning is probably a result of increased research activity and optimism, i.e. progress is self-reinforcing.