[zaphos]

They added a note at the end clarifying that they have flush to zero mode enabled.

quote from the article: "EDIT: This blogpost assumes that we enable flush to zero (FTZ) which treats denormal numbers as zeros. It’d be interesting to see reseachers try without FTZ!"

[dnautics]

you could (in theory) do the same thing anywhere but disabling denormals is the fastest (cpu count) way to create a big (relative displacement from linear) nonlinearity in the IEEE - and family fp representations.

Evolutionary methods to trap nonlinearities is already hard, I imagine it would be even harder to find functions which exploit even more subtle nonlinearities.