I’m reviewing the applications for SG at the moment, and there are an awful lot of people wanting to do some sort of optimisation based proposal at the workshop.Whilst I’m very keen for people to peruse this avenue, there seems to be a general level of naivety about how much a GA, or any other algorithmic improvement method can actually do to help in the design process. Hopefully this will subside as the wave of euphoria passes.My current feeling is that optimisation is essentially trivial, and evaluation is where we ought to be directing our efforts. There are kinds of things that could be evaluated and then given that feedback, we could use our really quite advanced problem solving brains to deal with all the little problems that are flagged up by the evaluation routines.That rant over with, I’m quite optimistic about the general state of the SG applications, there is some interesting stuff in there that I hope will get shared with the wider world as soon as possible!