Its really hard to know wether such fancy GA stuff works better or not. Since to know if it works you've got to do loads of these runs to get a statistically significant result. By the time you've done loads of runs there's no point doing them anymore!

There are some GA tricks though, its all in the papers. But to answer your question, mutation rate and crossover prob are uniformly disitrubuted along the genotype. Haven't inserted the best HD so far, but I'll experiment with this soon.

Are you reading up about GAs?