[mindcrime]

They are a treasure trove of easily publishable papers, but frankly the whole field feels like a fraud. Each paper is formulaic and consists of coming up with a metaphor to add minor twists to established heuristics, and in the end they all fare slightly better than Monte Carlo.

My understanding is that this problem got so bad that many (most?) of the top journals in the field have declared recently(ish) that they will no longer publish EvoComp papers of that nature. That is, the ones that amount to no more than "here's a new metaphor based algorithm that doesn't really contribute anything new to our understanding of anything and represent only an incremental improvement over existing algorithms."