[nullc]

Look at it this way: Many interesting problems in engineering have expensive to evaluate objectives with generally unknown structure and noisy multi-modal results, but are still piece-wise smooth. It's true that in the space of all possible functions virtually none meet these criteria, but many practically interesting ones do.

If your function really is some a random oracle, then, indeed, no optimizer will do well against it. OTOH, none will do (relatively) poorly either.

Effective optimization techniques can explore a function generally and exploit similarities to known models or at least any smoothness they can find. Ineffective techniques will just it caught in local minima or fail to exploit smoothness or "obvious" structure.

Powerful "generic" optimizers are a tool which is important for industry. But the common ways they are benchmarked potentially allows for overfitting in the design phase, this contest is intended to correct that, and provide a potentially better assessment of how general these optimizers are.