[eafan]

An important difference is the manner by which 'exploration' is codified in evolutionary algorithms, which allows for these algorithms to have a tune-able mix of hill-climbing and niche-finding. RL-based systems, Evolutionary Strategies, Swarm Intelligence, ... all are essentially hill-climbing and are typically much better at the 'exploit' aspect than the 'explore' aspect of the search. When you pair evolutionary algorithms with novelty search, for instance, you get very good coverage, as these guys have done with their sorting network work.