 The user has to choose an initial solution point, formula_230, and the initial step-size, formula_231.Optionally, the number of candidate samples λ (population size) can be modified by the user in order to change the characteristic search behavior (see above) and termination conditions can or should be adjusted to the problem at hand.The CMA-ES has been empirically successful in hundreds of applications and is considered to be useful in particular on non-convex, non-separable, ill-conditioned, multi-modal or noisy objective functions.