Comment by jules

I have searched for a problem that they're more suited to, and I've come to the conclusion that GAs are in fact not known to work on any problem. They do "work" in the sense that sometimes they find an answer, but there are other algorithms that are much simpler and consistently outperform them (notably randomized hill climbing). Here is a paper that despite trying to prove the opposite, clearly shows that GAs are NOT a good way to solve any problem: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/nips93.pdf