seeking convergence with optimize.fmin on scipy
Your question is a bit ambiguous. Are you printing the value of your function, or the point where it is evaluated?
My understanding of xtol and ftol is as follows. The iteration stops

when the change in the value of the function between iterations is less than ftol

AND

when the change in x between successive iterations is less than xtol

When you say "...accept the value of the parameter...", this suggests you should change xtol.
I have a function I want to minimize with scipy.optimize.fmin. Note that I force a print when my function is evaluated.
My problem is, when I start the minimization, the value printed decreases untill it reaches a certain point (the value 46700222.800). There it continues to decrease by very small bites, e.g., 46700222.797,46700222.765,46700222.745,46700222.699,46700222.688,46700222.678
So intuitively, I feel I have reached the minimum, since the length of each step are minus then 1. But the algorithm keeps running untill I get a "Maximum number of function evaluations has been exceeded" error.
My question is: how can I force my algorithm to accept the value of the parameter when the function evaluation reaches a value from where it does not really evolve anymore (let say, I don't gain more than 1 after an iteration). I read that the options ftol could be used but it has absolutely no effect on my code. In fact, I don't even know what value to put for ftol. I tried everything from 0.00001 to 10000 and there is still no convergence.