Oh I know a few. Evolution strategies, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, etc, etc.
They are a treasure trove of easily publishable papers, but frankly the whole field feels like a fraud. Each paper is formulaic and consists of coming up with a metaphor to add minor twists to established heuristics, and in the end they all fare slightly better than Monte Carlo.
The gravy train is provided by the No Free Lunch theorem, which is just a convenient copout to justify why an heuristics isn't good except on a single convenient realization.
They are a treasure trove of easily publishable papers, but frankly the whole field feels like a fraud. Each paper is formulaic and consists of coming up with a metaphor to add minor twists to established heuristics, and in the end they all fare slightly better than Monte Carlo.
The gravy train is provided by the No Free Lunch theorem, which is just a convenient copout to justify why an heuristics isn't good except on a single convenient realization.