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If only wishing made it so... Evolutionary approaches have always had one big feature in their favour: they are far more fun to work with. They produce all th

If only wishing made it so... Evolutionary approaches have always had one big feature in their favour: they are far more fun to work with. They produce all these fascinating oddities, like the one that learnt to outsmart it’s opponents at infinite tic-tac-toe by playing coordinates 102312 and 47875 and watching them run out of memory trying to build a data structure for the board. They are also far easier to combine with human expertise, i. e. “I can do this! Let’s throw some of my ideas into the gene pool”. But empirically it’s hard to deny that neural nets have been used for some incredible things over the last years. I think it’s the rare hype that is deserved.

simion314 9y ago
As others mentioned the hard part is modeling your problem, how to encode the "individuals", defining a good fitness function etc. I think he neural networks are more poplar now because are easy to use, you throw data at it and you get some results(though IMO I am scared that we are using things that we do not understand exactly how they work)
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maaaats 9y ago
I used them for my thesis to make bicycle wheels [0], was fun to watch it making the simulation explode in order to obtain extreme values. Also recently held a workshop where we used EAs to make figures walk[1]. A lot of funny results at the end! [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410813 [1]: https://github.com/Matsemann/walkingea https://github.com/Matsemann/walkingea