[Turing_Machine]

"Even if it did, this is a problem explicitly designed to give GAs an advantage."

Well, yeah, you'd want to use GAs on problems for which they were well-suited. That's not at all the same as "clearly shows that GAs are NOT a good way to solve any problem".

[jules]

Sure. The point is the effort they had to find such a problem. That indicates that it is very unlikely that any given practical problem is suitable for GAs. Again, if you are aware of any real problem where GAs work better than hill climbing, please do share. Note that this is not a very high bar. For example the same applied to quicksort vs insertion sort is "find any real example where quicksort outperforms insertion sort". If you couldn't find such an example and had to go to great lengths to artificially construct such an example then I'd call quicksort a failure, given that it's more complicated than insertion sort. Why GAs were/are as hyped as they are is a mystery to me.

[janmonschke]

I've seen a lot GAs tuning parmeters for other algorithms. Someone already mentioned it here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4561167.

But I agree, that they are not a silver bullet for any kind of problem and for most problems there is almost always a way smarter and more efficient algorithm. I did not hold this presentation to show that GAs were the best solution for any problem. My intention was to teach sth. that I myself liked in university. Especially I thought that the way we were taught GAs in university was too complicated and complex.