Comment on 'Optimization of photonic crystal structures', J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 21, 2223-2232 (2004)'

Recently, Smajic et al. published an article on numerical structural opti- mizations of two-dimensional photonic crystals using two different classes of optimization algorithms i.e, deterministic for local searches and stochastic for global. In this comment we reexamine some of their conclusions regarding the global stochastic search strategies. It is concluded that the steps taken to increase the efficiency of the optimization of the test problem chosen by Smajic et al., which was selected to keep the search space tractable, can be mislead- ing when applied to intractable problems.