Soft-decision decoding is an NP-hard problem of great interest to developers of communication systems. We show that this problem is equivalent to the problem of optimizing Walsh polynomials. We present genetic algorithms for soft-decision decoding of binary linear block codes and compare the performance with various other decoding algorithms including the currently developed A* algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithms achieve bit-error-probabilities as low as 0.00183 for a [104,52] code with a low signal-to-noise ratio of 2.5 dB , exploring only 22,400 codewords, whereas the search space contains 4.5 × 10 l5 codewords. We define a new crossover operator that exploits domain-specific information and compare it with uniform and two-point crossover.