<p>Update as of 2017: The answer is YES. The <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03864" rel="nofollow noreferrer">most downloaded paper over the past month in Reinforcement Learning</a>, aptly named "<strong>Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning</strong>" is indeed the talk of the town.</p>
Can evolutionary computation be a method of reinforcement learning?
<p>What is <em>evolutionary computation</em>? Is it a method of reinforcement learning? Or a separate method of machine learning? Or maybe none?</p>

<p>Please, cite references used to answer this question.</p>