Some people had succes doing GA with mutation, or some other approaches that I don’t know (Westicles for example).
Others divided the problem on smaller ones, and treated it as an Exact Cover problem.
Premises:
-A number can only be used once.
-You know that a solution is when all numbers are removed. That is equal to a set of numbers that ends in a zero (you subtract a number X to another X, reaching a zero).
With these two premises you can infer that a solution probably are N sets of numbers, each set reaching a zero. The problem then changed from getting an precise move list for all numbers to find enough zero-sum sets that can be combined to cover all numbers once and only once (exact cover problem).
This approach is good in most levels below 200. Except a few hard levels most of them are solved in minutes, not hours. Above 200 the size increases a lot and the exact cover problem begins to be intractable.