In computer science, evolutionary computation is a subfield of artificial intelligence (more particularly computational intelligence) that can be defined by the type of algorithms it is concerned with. These algorithms, called evolutionary algorithms, are based on adopting Darwinian principles, hence the name. Technically they belong to the family of  trial and error problem solvers and can be considered global optimization methods with a metaheuristic or stochastic optimization character, distinguished by the use of a population of candidate solutions (rather than just iterating over one point in the search space). They are mostly applied for black box problems (no derivatives known), often in the context of expensive optimization.