[moconnor]

That's not quite my understanding of the paper's results: "As can be seen, the time to reach level one is comparable for the two algorithms, but the GA is much faster at reaching levels 2 and 3. Further, the GA discovers level 3 approximately twice as often as RMHC [randomized hill climbing]"

I don't dispute that there are generally better optimization algorithms than GAs, but this paper does present an artificial case in a GA outperforms hill climbing.

[jules]

See my reply here for an explanation of how little that conclusion of the paper means: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4561418

In particular they tuned the GA but not he hill climber, so it's not clear that GAs win even on this artificially designed problem.

[Turing_Machine]

Wait a minute. First you were citing the paper's conclusion as supporting your position and now you're attacking the paper's conclusion?

[jules]

I never cited the paper's conclusion as my position. What the paper shows is not what the paper concludes. The authors clearly didn't want to show that GAs are inferior, though inadvertently they certainly did. BTW, the authors of the paper conclude that further research is necessary to find cases where GAs outperform hill climbing.