Evolutionary Algorithms are the New Deep Learning

Deep learning (DL) has transformed much of AI, and demonstrated how machine learning can make a difference in the real world. Its core technology is gradient descent, which has been used in neural networks since the 1980s. However, massive expansion of available training data and compute gave it a new instantiation that significantly increased its power. Evolutionary computation (EC) is on the verge of a similar breakthrough. Importantly, however, EC addresses a different but equally far-reaching problem.