We proposed a population-based metaheuristic called the spy algorithm for solving optimization problems and evaluated its performance. The design of our spy algorithm ensures the benefit of exploration and exploitation as well as cooperative and non-cooperative searches in each iteration. We compared the spy algorithm with genetic algorithm, improved harmony search, and particle swarm optimization on a set of non-convex functions that focus on accuracy, the ability of detecting many global optimum points, and computation time. From statistical analysis results, the spy algorithm outperformed the other algorithms. The spy algorithm had the best accuracy and detected more global optimum points within less computation time, indicating that our spy algorithm is more robust and faster then these other algorithms.