Schaffer, Cullen (1994). "A conservation law for generalization performance"(PDF). In Willian, H.; Cohen, W. (eds.). International Conference on Machine Learning. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. pp. 259–265.
Wolpert, David (1996). "The Lack of A Priori Distinctions between Learning Algorithms". Neural Computation. Vol. 8. pp. 1341–1390. doi:10.1162/neco.1996.8.7.1341. S2CID207609360.
English, T. M. (2000). "Optimization is easy and learning is hard in the typical function". Proceedings of the 2000 Congress on Evolutionary Computation. CEC00 (Cat. No.00TH8512). Vol. 2. pp. 924–931. doi:10.1109/CEC.2000.870741. ISBN0-7803-6375-2. S2CID11295575.
Ho, Y. C.; Pepyne, D. L. (2002). "Simple Explanation of the No-Free-Lunch Theorem and Its Implications". Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. 115 (3): 549–570. doi:10.1023/A:1021251113462. S2CID123041865.
The "only if" part was first published by Schumacher, C. W. (2000). Black Box Search : Framework and Methods (PhD dissertation). The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. ProQuest304620040.
Wolpert, David (1996). "The Lack of A Priori Distinctions between Learning Algorithms". Neural Computation. Vol. 8. pp. 1341–1390. doi:10.1162/neco.1996.8.7.1341. S2CID207609360.
English, T. M. (2000). "Optimization is easy and learning is hard in the typical function". Proceedings of the 2000 Congress on Evolutionary Computation. CEC00 (Cat. No.00TH8512). Vol. 2. pp. 924–931. doi:10.1109/CEC.2000.870741. ISBN0-7803-6375-2. S2CID11295575.
Ho, Y. C.; Pepyne, D. L. (2002). "Simple Explanation of the No-Free-Lunch Theorem and Its Implications". Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. 115 (3): 549–570. doi:10.1023/A:1021251113462. S2CID123041865.