> Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization

The no free lunch theorem is so absurdly limited because of the constraints that it's IMO a tautology and fundamentally irrelevant outside of exceptionally tiny areas. You can't have one search algorithm that's better than others on average when searching entirely random things with no structure? 1. Yes, obviously. Nice to have a formulation but it's not exactly a surprise and 2. That's not what we deal with in the real world.