# Are Genetic Algorithms suitable for a problem with a non-unique optimal solution?

I was wondering if a genetic algorithm is useful if the optimization problem has several optimal solutions.

My thought was that I should not use it since when combining two members of a population who have good fitness but are close to different optimal solutions, the child will get retarded.

Is this thinking wrong? If so, why?

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• It sounds as though your approach results in a single child. In our genetic implementations, we always have multiple children; some are averages, some are mutations, etc. However, our generations always additionally contain $n$ top performers from the previous generation and slightly mutated versions of those top performers. We find this allows us to find multiple optimal solutions since we allow multiple paths to be followed. Nov 26 at 1:35