The scanning method is a computer simulation technique for polymer chains, which is especially suitable to handle chains with finite interactions and chains that are subject to various geometrical constraints. A chain is constructed step by step with the help of transition probabilities, obtained by scanning the possible continuations of the chain in future steps (called future chains). We discuss in detail the efficiency of the method and for that we study certain autocorrelation functions for three lattice models: selfhyphen;avoiding walks (SAWs) on a square lattice, a random walk model for polymer adsorption and trails with attractive interactions. We demonstrate that for SAWs the scanning method is significantly more efficient than the related method of Rosenbluth and Rosenbluth. We also develop and test a new procedure in which the transition probabilities are obtained, not by exact enumeration of all the future chains, but from a relatively small sample of future chains, generated by another scanning procedure. This lsquo;lsquo;double scanningrsquo;rsquo; process is expected to be useful for complex macromolecules such as polypeptides.
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