Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-chemistry-course-of-the-year-4-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/paper-2/section-g/31/b/solution

For a chosen bead, the uniform displacement cube is inversion symmetric, so the proposal distribution satisfies . The target canonical density is for allowed configurations. With ,
This proves detailed balance. Overlapping trials have zero target weight and are rejected. The proposal must retain rejected trials as self-transitions; repeatedly proposing until a nonoverlapping move appears would generally introduce a configuration-dependent proposal normalization and need a Hastings correction. Detailed balance establishes stationarity, while sufficient sampling also requires practical exploration of the accessible state space.

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