it's basically a search technique for problems where the search space is too large. so you visit "promising" portions of the search space. this happens a lot in

it's basically a search technique for problems where the search space is too large. so you visit "promising" portions of the search space. this happens a lot in computer science, and it happens even more in real life ;) the postgres query optimizer is an example I know off the top of my head (it uses GAs for the join order; at least for queries with enough joins): http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/geqo.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/geqo.html