Hybrid evolutionary algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems: memetic overkill?

We study a selected group of hybrid EAs for solving CSPs, consisting of the best performing EAs from the literature. We investigate the contribution of the evolutionary component to their performance by comparing the hybrid EAs with their "de-evolutionarised" variants. The experiments show that "de-evolutionarising" can increase performance, in some cases doubling it. Considering that the problem domain and the algorithms are arbitrarily selected from the "memetic niche", it seems likely that the same effect occurs for other problems and algorithms. Therefore, our conclusion is that after designing and building a memetic algorithm, one should perform a verification by comparing this algorithm with its "de-evolutionarised" variant.