I was wondering if anyone else had that reaction. I'm looking at a story about how Bradley was using elaborate GAs to choose the weightings on a small handful of variables that, from the description, sounds like they should've yielded to a regularized linear regression producing a fast cheap optimal answer; and I'm thinking to myself, "Either the journalist completely failed to understand and/or convey the problem that was being solved, or nobody designing this system understood anything about statistical learning and were just throwing cool-sounding tools at the problem, or they were just having fun at the reporter's expense."

For those unlearned in AI, an analogy: the original article reads like someone talking about how they used Haskell monads to add 2 + 2.