I work on optimization software and I'm pretty sure you could do some serious damage to the government's tax collection efforts if you hooked up a genetic algorithm to some very good accounting software to minimize taxes.
The problem with GA's is that they frequently exploit loopholes in their setups, so you get solutions that technically satisfy your evaluation criteria but it's not what you really want. This process is basically what corporate accountants do manually to get ridiculously low tax rates for big companies. Congress writes the tax code but it will always have loopholes, and GA's will definitely find them.
Here's a recent blog post of mine that goes into some of the problems with GA's, which when you're looking for loopholes is actually a huge advantage:
The problem with GA's is that they frequently exploit loopholes in their setups, so you get solutions that technically satisfy your evaluation criteria but it's not what you really want. This process is basically what corporate accountants do manually to get ridiculously low tax rates for big companies. Congress writes the tax code but it will always have loopholes, and GA's will definitely find them.
Here's a recent blog post of mine that goes into some of the problems with GA's, which when you're looking for loopholes is actually a huge advantage:
http://designbyrobots.com/2012/03/29/evolution-is-cleverer-t...