kick

Overview
Over the years, stochastic search procedure for generating starting structures on the potential energy surface has evolved from 50 lines of Fortran code with simple and rugged idea, to a variety of different flavors and variants. Here, some of those are presented, and implemented in a web-page variant using javascript.

Introduction
This is a quick guide in evolution of "KICK" stochastic search procedure. It has had many iterations in the past 16 years in our research group (Vrček-Šakić), including moving from FORTRAN to c++, then rewriting from c++ to bash for usage in command line without compiler, and lastly rewritten in javascript for usage in web-pages.

Two other approaches are:
Coalescence Kick (https://github.com/averkiev75/Coalescence-Kick) in c++ by Boris Averkiev
SnippetKick (https://github.com/HumanOsv/SnippetKick) in Perl by Osvaldo Yañez Osses

The original paper that started everything: "Stochastic Search for Isomers on a Quantum Mechanical Surface" by Martin Saunders, (J. Comput. Chem. 2004, 25, 621 - 626.) was published in 2004, and has been cited 177 times (2020).