This article presents an evaluation of Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) with variable inertia weight and Free Search (FS) with variable neighbour space applied to nonconstrained numerical test. The objectives are to assess how high convergence speed reflects on adaptation to various test problems and to identify possible balance between convergence speed and adaptation, which allows the algorithms to complete successfully the process of search on heterogeneous tasks with limited computational resources within a reasonable finite time and with acceptable for engineering purposes precision. Modification strategies of both algorithms are compared in terms of their ability for search space exploration. Five numerical tests are explored. Achieved experimental results are presented and analysed
