  Rotation symmetric Boolean functions represent an interesting class of
Boolean functions as they are relatively rare compared to general Boolean
functions. At the same time, the functions in this class can have excellent
properties, making them interesting for various practical applications. The
usage of metaheuristics to construct rotation symmetric Boolean functions is a
direction that has been explored for almost twenty years. Despite that, there
are very few results considering evolutionary computation methods. This paper
uses several evolutionary algorithms to evolve rotation symmetric Boolean
functions with different properties. Despite using generic metaheuristics, we
obtain results that are competitive with prior work relying on customized
heuristics. Surprisingly, we find that bitstring and floating point encodings
work better than the tree encoding. Moreover, evolving highly nonlinear general
Boolean functions is easier than rotation symmetric ones.
