The energy landscape paradigm (Goldstein 1969, Wales 1997) describes complex systems via their potential energy surface — a high-dimensional surface with many local minima (inherent structures) separated by barriers. Basin-hopping replaces the landscape with a "staircase" of local minima: take a step, minimize locally, accept/reject via Metropolis criterion. This finds the global minimum far more efficiently than simple MC by using the basin structure directly.