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Population initialization is a crucial task in population-based optimization methods, which can affect the convergence speed and also the quality of the final solutions. Generally, if no a priori information about the solutions is available, the initial population is often selected randomly using random numbers. This paper presents a new initialization method by applying the concept of adaptive randomness (AR) to distribute the individuals as spaced out as possible over the search space. To verify the performance of AR, a comprehensive set of 34 benchmark functions with a wide range of dimensions is utilized. Conducted experiments demonstrate that AR-based population initialization performs better than other population initialization methods such as random population initialization, opposition-based population initialization, and generalized opposition-based population initialization in the convergence speed and the quality of the final solutions. Further, the influences of the problem dimensionality, the new control parameter, and the number of trial individuals are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]