Review: Climbing the Steiner Tree

Overview

Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II have made available a paper titled Climbing the Steiner Tree — Sources of Active Information in a Genetic Algorithm for Solving the Euclidean Steiner Tree Problem wherein they claim to have identified sources of “active information” in a genetic algorithm used to find solutions to a Steiner problem. The problem referenced in this paper was originally described by Dave Thomas on the Panda’s Thumb almost six years ago. I developed a GA to solve the problem that Dave posed as a challenge a few weeks later, as did a number of other people.

This paper suffers from numerous flaws, starting with a fundamental mischaracterization of the purpose of Thomas’s solution and including general misunderstanding of genetic algorithms, misapplication of the No Free Lunch theorems, spurious claims about “active information”, and incorrect and unsupported assertions regarding the impact of certain GA implementation details.
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