Interesting that the percentage difference between the winning solution with 107 blended approaches and the close-by solutions using only one approach was on the order of a fraction of a percent in improvement.
Yet another real-life application of the 80/20 rule....
In computational biology (my world), it's routine for an initial study to account for most of the eventual success of a method, with many man-years of work dedicated to improving success rates only by tiny fractions.
(As an aside, if you're an ambitious researcher, the implication of this is clear: don't waste your time refining things. Rapid testing of ideas is more important than squeezing out that last 1% of performance improvement. Iterative refinement is research death.)
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