QGA

I may have been a bit hasty in my dismissal of Quantum Genetic Algorithms. Having now read a bit of background literature, I'll concede that it's at least worth investigating. Unfortunately, it's hamstrung by the fact that the Quantum Computer does not yet exist. And a simulated QGA is pretty lame. The papers I've seen that claim faster convergence are cheating: they aren't counting all the extra computation complexity in simulating the quantum registers. If you applied the same effort to some sort of probabilistic crossover scheme, I'm quite sure you could get the same convergence rates.

That's not to say that simulating it is a bad idea. Charles Babbage's computing engine never really worked, but Ada Lovelace's programs written for it laid the groundwork for imperative programming decades before they could be practically applied. Given the accelerating pace of hardware advances, it makes some sense to get a jump on things because the quantum computer will show up one of these days; probably sooner rather than later.

But, until that day comes, we're stuck with deterministic computing and throwing a sheet over it and calling it something else is less than intellectually honest.