> I believe the problem is with ever advancing hardware. The new chips are much faster and would "overtake" an experiment that's been running. There's no reaso

> I believe the problem is with ever advancing hardware. The new chips are much faster and would "overtake" an experiment that's been running. There's no reason why this would have to be a problem. It should be possibly at any given iteration to take a snapshot of the population and transfer it over to new hardware. One could even consider experiments in which you periodically scaled the population up to utilize an order of magnitude more computing power (to increase diversity in a population that had converged to some local optimum) and then scaled it back down to some randomly selected subset once sufficient divergence had occurred. Since computing resources can be purchased in small discrete units these days, this might even be a viable method to reduce overall search cost.