Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

While I was reviewing GECCO papers, it reminded me of different styles of writing presumptions. Some researchers write presumptions implicitly, and others write them explicitly. However, I found that some people misunderstood the meaning of those presumptions. For example, one of presumptions of Dirk Thierens‘ convergence-time model (1994) is infinite population size, and I’ve heard people think the result is not useful because infinite population is unrealistic in real problems. However, it is already an good approximation for even not too large population size (central limit theory). Of course, there exist many papers about finite population size correction, and they have different strength and weakness (usually more accurate predictions and less insights, see Dave’s post here.). But my point is, the results in a paper might still be very helpful for your applications even if not every presumptions is fulfilled, and I like it when people write clearly about their presumptions because I feel that they really know what they are talking about.