Figure also shows that as the elitism rate increases, so does the speedup (ESI Table ). This is because as you increase the elitism rate, more of the population remains unchanged and there are fewer new individuals to evaluate per generation. Since the convergence criteria are set to have a Spearman's correlation coefficient above 0.8 between each generation for 50 generations, it is much easier for the GA to converge before efficiently exploring chemical space. A GA with no elitism is only slightly better than a brute force approach, with a median speedup of only 4. Since there is no guarantee of good traits in the generation, it is very difficult to converge on a good population.