Protect yourself from genetic algorithms surprises
I just ran into the comic strip below at xkcd. I am still laughing now. Fitness functions are tricky. Once somebody told me that genetic algorithms always get their target; the main problem is to explain what the target is. If you want to learn a “fountain pen”, you better be accurate defining it or you may end up getting an unexpected all-terrain “pencil”. Yes, I know the example is quite solution free, but still has some truth to it. How many times have you end up getting something you did not expect, only because evolution find a better fitted crack in your description? Anyway, it is fun what you end running into on the Internet ;) ...