When using GAs you must, however, be careful what you ask for. University of Sussex researcher Jon Bird used a GA to optimally design an oscillator circuit. Several attempts generated conventional designs using a small number of transistors, but the winning design was not an oscillator at all but a simple radio circuit. Apparently the GA discovered that the radio circuit picked up an oscillating hum from a nearby computer.176 The GA’s solution worked only in the exact location on the table where it was asked to solve the problem.
