Fmincon Too many input arguments

This is driving me crazy. I have almost this exact line of code in another program and it works perfectly.

      bellman_handle = @(capnext)bellmanRHScont(capnext,transd(j,:), c , x(i), start, beta, theta(j), b, mc);
      [action,value]=fmincon(bellman_handle,1,[],[],[],[],0,k,[],[],options);

I am using an anonymous function, but when I run the code I get the following error. Any ideas?

Error using
@(capnext)bellmanRHScont(capnext,transd(j,:),c,x(i),start,beta,theta(j),b,mc)
Too many input arguments.

Error in fmincon (line 564)
      initVals.f = feval(funfcn{3},X,varargin{:});

Error in testmodelcont (line 100)
                [action,value]=fmincon(bellman_handle,1,[],[],[],[],0,k,[],[],options);

Caused by:
    Failure in initial user-supplied objective
    function evaluation. FMINCON cannot continue.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

You did not show us the header for bellmanRHScont so we do not know how many inputs it expects. You are passing in 9 inputs to it.

You are passing 11 inputs to fmincon(). fmincon() is not documented as accepting more than 10 inputs. For historical reasons, any inputs past the 10th will be passed as extra parameters to the function, so two parameters would be passed to your function handle that expects only 1.

You should re-count the number of [] you have. You might wish to assign the various [] to variable names to make it clearer which [] corresponds to which parameter.

[Joseph Cullen]

Good call. I didn't realize that any extra parameters would be passed to the function. I have two minimizers that I use: fmincon and knitro. Knitro has 11 inputs and fmincon has 10. I had one extra set of empty brackets in the fmincon call. Not an easy difference to spot.

knitromatlab(bellman_handle,1,[],[],[],[],0,k,[],[],options);
incorrect:  fmincon(bellman_handle,1,[],[],[],[],0,k,[],[],options);
correct:  fmincon(bellman_handle,1,[],[],[],[],0,k,[],options);

[Walter Roberson]

Sounds like a good reason to use variables that have been assigned [] in order to document the purpose of each []