Genetic algorithms (GAs) are powerful search techniques based on principles of evolution and widely applied to solve problems in many disciplines. However, most GAs employed in practice nowadays are unable to learn genetic linkage and suffer from the linkage problem. The linkage learning genetic algorithm (LLGA) was proposed to tackle the linkage problem with several specially designed mechanisms. While the LLGA performs much better on badly scaled problems than simple GAs, it does not work well on uniformly scaled problems as other competent GAs. Therefore, we need to understand why it is...