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I know that some academics are critical of evolutionary approaches. Steven Skiena, for one, in his algorithms textbook, said something to the effect of never ha

I know that some academics are critical of evolutionary approaches. Steven Skiena, for one, in his algorithms textbook, said something to the effect of never having encountered a problem in which an evolutionary approach was more effective than a more straightforward approach. However, this was before "big data" had become such a focus in computing, so this might have changed. Hopefully some other HN readers can weigh in on this.

jmmcd 12y ago
Una-May O'Reilly is particularly interested in genetic programming, which is commonly used for free-form regression, but its larger vision/promise is as a method of program synthesis. As far as I know there are no more straightforward approaches to these problems.