[protoplaid]

> especially if the first sample looks particularly “good”.

You've precisely described the problem: the algorithm will get stuck on a point if the first sample looks good and the assumption of zero variance. Until it randomly hits a luckier sampler (but not necessarily better point).

Another related problem, is that the boundaries of the parameter space have a bad score (objective function), but very low variance (they're always bad), which confuses the search function into believing that the interior points also have a very low variance, which is incorrect.

If anyone knows of a library that handles those cases correctly, without providing user-defined priors for each dimensions, I'd be glad to hear