While related, MC and NCMC moves are executed and evaluated differently. In MC, a move is instantaneously attempted and accepted or rejected according to its impact on the potential energy of the system. For NCMC, a move proposal proceeds via a non-equilibrium switching protocol consisting of a series of perturbation and propagation steps wherein the structural and thermodynamic degrees of freedom are progressively sampled. During this stepwise process, the surrounding environment of the system can react to the perturbation before the move is accepted or rejected. This is especially useful for condensed phase systems as the surrounding solvent can make way for the repositioning of other atoms. Unlike MC, move acceptance depends not on the resultant potential energy, but rather the (nonequilibrium) work performed over the course of the NCMC move. The total work is tallied and the move is either accepted or rejected according to an acceptance criterion; this ensures the resulting states are sampled from the Boltzmann distribution and are representative of the equilibrium populations.