Comment by jules

Sure. The point is the effort they had to find such a problem. That indicates that it is very unlikely that any given practical problem is suitable for GAs. Again, if you are aware of any real problem where GAs work better than hill climbing, please do share. Note that this is not a very high bar. For example the same applied to quicksort vs insertion sort is "find any real example where quicksort outperforms insertion sort". If you couldn't find such an example and had to go to great lengths to artificially construct such an example then I'd call quicksort a failure, given that it's more complicated than insertion sort. Why GAs were/are as hyped as they are is a mystery to me.