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The genetic algorithm technique is often used to solve a problem just because it's cool, and not necessarily because it is the best way to solve the problem.

Is this the case with this "Mona Lisa" problem? Is there an alternative algorithm for finding the polygons that would be more efficient and give better results?

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It's likely that there is a better way. There already exist deterministic bitmap rasterizers which might yield decent results, and almost instantly. A greedy algorithm that tries to place the "most necessary" polygon first would almost certainly find a reasonable solution in a very short amount of time. Even a hybrid approach -- where the algorithm randomly picks a solution parameter and does a line search for the best value -- would converge faster than random hill-climbing alone.

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