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> The only thing EAs have going for them ... is the ability to optimise a black-box objective.
by jmmcd 9y ago
> The only thing EAs have going for them
... is the ability to optimise a black-box objective.
- yters 9y agoNo free lunch theorem!
- jmmcd 9y agoEAs optimise black-box objective functions. NFL prevents them from doing well on all possible objective functions. But rather weak assumptions are enough to evade NFL, for example the assumption that maximal steepness in the objective space is not achieved (there are many others also). It's particularly easy to make such assumptions when the problems arise in our universe (that's the subset of problems we're interested in), because our universe has structure -- see eg Lin and Tegmark.