Basically, the root disagreement was "monotonic improvement". Evolution is awesome, but it couldn't work with only monotonic improvement.
I used to do an "optimization" on my genetic algorithms. I'd ensure the highest scoring genome of the last population was a member of the new one. It made sure every single generation improved or stood still.
It was a good idea to keep a copy of the "best" genome around for final output, but by keeping it in the search space, I was damaging the ability of the algorithm to do it's job by dragging the search space constantly back to the most recent local optima.
I used to do an "optimization" on my genetic algorithms. I'd ensure the highest scoring genome of the last population was a member of the new one. It made sure every single generation improved or stood still.
It was a good idea to keep a copy of the "best" genome around for final output, but by keeping it in the search space, I was damaging the ability of the algorithm to do it's job by dragging the search space constantly back to the most recent local optima.