  A new method, AMORE - based on a genetic algorithm optimizer, is presented
for the automated study of colour-magnitude diagrams. The method combines
several stellar population synthesis tools developed in the last decade by or
in collaboration with the Padova group. Our method is able to recover, within
the uncertainties, the parameters -- distance, extinction, age, metallicity,
index of a power-law initial mass function and the index of an exponential star
formation rate -- from a reference synthetic stellar population. No a priori
information is inserted to recover the parameters, which is done simultaneously
and not one at a time. Examples are given to demonstrate and to better
understand biases in the results, if one of the input parameters is
deliberately set fixed to a non-optimum value.
