[chm]

Wow, I am surprised about the "aaa..." password. Thanks for clearing that up.

When I asked how useful this was, I assumed the organisms were removed from the front of the list. If you keep everything, then yes I can see how this can be used to crack passwords. It's not clear to me how it would be useful otherwise, as which organisms stay in the list is not homogeneously random, and so one organism might be quite unlucky (even though its offspring could have been very successful).

So basically this can be viewed as an accelerated brute-force of long/complex passwords?

[lyle_nel]

I would not put it in the category of brute-force since it really does have all the properties of a genetic algorithm. But yes it does succeed to a greater extent at cracking passwords that are intractable(long/complex) with a brute-force approach.