In recent years, the issue of linkage in GEAs has garnered greater attention and recognition from researchers. Conventional approaches that rely much on ad hoc tweaking of parameters to control the search by balancing the level of exploitation and exploration are grossly inadequate. As shown in the work reported here, such parameters tweaking based approaches have their limits; they can be easily "fooled" by cases of triviality or peculiarity of the class of problems that the algorithms are designed to handle. Furthermore, these approaches are usually blind to the interactions between the...