Battling with GA-Joe
S. Grand · IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications · 1998
For 20 years I've been advocating soft, bottom-up, massively parallel computing techniques and waging a war on top-down, serial, control-freak thinking. Yet, just lately, I've found myself becoming increasingly disdainful of genetic algorithms and other evolutionary software techniques. What's happening-have I become a traitor to my cause? I hope not; evolution undoubtedly works. I've used it many times out of academic interest and more than once against genuinely difficult, practical problems. In fact, it's partly because it works that I have such a problem with it. I don't like what evolutionary research is doing to the field of artificial life. The author discusses the latest directions of artificial life.