[GordonS]

Yep, I recently worked on an engineering project, where GAs were used to evolve new designs for large steel structures, with the aim of reducing weight (and, ergo, cost).

There were a lot of constraints, and several applications were used at different points (e.g. specialised 3D CAD) - a single generation took around 1 hour, so we had to let it run for days at a time on a cluster to be useful.

[faceplanted]

Which genetic algorithm were you using?

[GordonS]

I wasn't in the AI team (I was the architect for the cloud infrastructure and backend), but my understanding was it was pretty much a "textbook" implementation (I dabbled with GAs, basic neural networks and swarm optimisation several years ago).

I actually kind of surprised, because I didn't realise people still used GAs any more, let alone such a standard implementation.