So I solved this kata but I had a huge problem with understanding of scope. I was flabbergast trying to figure out why my fitnesses would degrade with each generation. It turned out the two selected chromosomes to seed a new population were being edited when I ran crossover and mutate. I fixed this by doing newPop[0].split('').join('') but I figure there's a better way to go about this. Any tips for a noob?

Thanks for providing this explination bkimmel, I would have been lost without it.

So as it turns out I didn't need any regex ... making the problem harder than it needed to be.

Can you explain to me why the \s+ is needed in this solution? I tried playing around with it some on regexpal and jsfiddle. While its obvious it needs to be there or it won't work, I don't understand why.

Thanks nklein.