Ah I understand, half the battle is terminology (I was introduced to the 'weights' as hard and soft constraints, with corresponding penalties against the fitnes

Ah I understand, half the battle is terminology (I was introduced to the 'weights' as hard and soft constraints, with corresponding penalties against the fitness function score). Even though I did research on it, I found that the field is subject to a lot of colloquialisms (for lack of a better term) when it comes to different research cliques, and therefore the terminology I use isn't any more of less correct as a result. It seems like you've got as good a handle on it as anyone. My research was mainly involving investigating parallelism of the above algorithm (not very friendly to parallelism without work). Nowadays, there's so many academic open source optimizers, as well as commerical, that I would usually tell people if you're solving for a business case, it's often more cost effective to frame your problem in a format digestible by the solvers and let them at it than writing the solvers yourself. Of course, where's the fun in that? I'm jealous that you got to use this for a problem that you had, rather than in my approach which was for a problem I didn't need solved myself. I bet that was satisfying.