  This paper presents a novel numerical optimisation method for infinite
dimensional optimisation. The functional optimisation makes minimal assumptions
about the functional and without any specific knowledge on the derivative of
the functional. The algorithm has been tested on several physical systems
(brachistochrone and catenary problems) and it is shown that the solutions
obtained are close to the actual solutions in one thousand functional
evaluations. It is also shown that for the tested cases, the new algorithm
provides better convergence to the optimum value compared to the tested
existing algorithms.
