&gt; Luckily machine learning came along and has shown empirically that the solution is to increase the number of dimensions.<p>Ah yes, that&#x27;s just what brilliant scientists like Mendel, Darwin, Fisher, Wright, Watson et al. were missing: Deep Learning! &#x2F;s. The number of local optima grows exponentially in problem dimension, so increasing the dimension simply provides an even stronger guarantee that your optimizer will converge to one. Evolution, for its part, is definitely stuck in one, as evidenced by the fact that I cannot fly.