> I hope this doesn't come off as flamey or troll-like. Not at all, don't worry! I hope mine didn't either. I don't think I listed any application problems --

> I hope this doesn't come off as flamey or troll-like. Not at all, don't worry! I hope mine didn't either. I don't think I listed any application problems -- I guess you mean the GECCO awards --- but I don't think they are all graph problems in the conventional CS sense, i.e. A* and similar algorithms do not apply. I don't think we're in much disagreement. I'm not a cheerleader for GP, I just disagreed with your claim that your algorithm simply "outperformed" it. GAs and GP have been used widely outside of the research community, particularly GAs. They're used for problems where there isn't an obvious approach, human intuition fails, the maths is intractable, etc. There are toolboxes for major applications like Matlab. Sometimes it's not obvious that this is the case. It's been a few years since I've been to GECCO (I was there when the benchmarks paper was presented), but they used to have a lot of industrial applications presented each year. There are plenty of stochastic algorithms that are more effective by some measure than their non-stochastic counterparts. No rationale for bias there. Anyway, this is probably a little too detailed a discussion for HN, ha!