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Awesome, but why a genetic algorithm? I wonder if it could be formulated as a tractable optimization problem instead.

Or perhaps solved more purely using Calculus of Variations.

that was my first thought too. we developers sometimes get so caught up in development weforget there's a whole world of other tools.

I've added a small postscript explaining why calculus of variations (in its simplest form at least) is not applicable to this problem.

I was thinking the same thing. It is a good exercise to test a genetic algorithm but a numerical solver could have been used as well.