The method was designed to provide a uniform and unbiased sampling of the lattice energy surface, which is important for fully exploring the structural diversity available to a molecule in forming stable crystal structures. The lack of bias in the search towards identifying low energy structures makes it effective at locating metastable crystal structures, while it has also been shown to usually find the global energy minimum early in a search. A further advance of the approach is its parallelizability: each local energy minimization is independent, so the minimization of all trial structures can be performed in parallel if sufficient processors is available.