> Evolution is _really_ good Really this is an effect of all optimization approaches, not just "evolutionary" ones. Even simple parameter hill climbers will do

> Evolution is _really_ good Really this is an effect of all optimization approaches, not just "evolutionary" ones. Even simple parameter hill climbers will do that. A fun personal example, many years ago I was trying to optimize an antenna design. I used a simple blackbox optimizer to adapt a parametrization of the geometry and a simulator to characterize the performance. I started it off and it was slowly making progress. The next day I came back and was exited to see _very good results_ ... but it turned out that it had made the length of the antenna _negative_ and the simulation was spouting nonsense (like the peak gain was a complex number). :) The fundamental unreality of negative lengths must have resulted in me not thinking to add that as a constraint or make sure the simulation handled them gracefully... much in the same way that input fuzzing can turn up nasty bugs in otherwise well tested and competently written software.