I first came across it when I was hitting certain boundary conditions w/ GA/GP in the early 90s. It's pretty great. Of course, as stochastic methods go, you never know when they are going to get there. I am gratified to find recent research in the DL community going back and saying, "you know what? some of these GA/GP/PSO critiques of multi-layer NN were right, and they had something to say!". But, I'm too old and grumpy to do anything with either gratitude, or revenge or research dollars now. I just mostly tell the kids to get off my lawn.

EDIT: I'm simply saying that saying: "I told you so!" 25+ years later doesn't get me my life or my wife back. I was a misplaced, from my agent-centric-point-of-view, sample. If I could only learn to lean back and give it up for England. (just kidding)