[weaponofchoice]

You make an excellent point about how early imperfections in the algorithms could be fixed as they evolve through feedback, and that this step-process running faster would get us the desired (evolved) algorithms quicker.

But couldn't we accomplish this with distributed processing rather than faster hardware?

[hexagonc]

I think distributed processing is another form of faster hardware. It is certainly more operations per unit time. Evolutionary algorithms are interesting because they are able to exploit parallel processing better than most. Evolution amounts to a type of heuristic tree search, where once an algorithm has found a solution to a problem, the knowledge is persisted and shared with other algorithms.

Later algorithms can be run on lesser hardware because they don't have to retread the same territory as their ancestors; they only have to search the space that hasn't already been examined. As the saying goes, they search "smarter, not harder".