We introduce a novel simulation method, model hopping, that enhances sampling of low-energy configurations in complex systems. The approach is illustrated for a protein folding problem. Thermodynamic quantities of proteins with up to 46 residues are evaluated from all-atom simulations with this method.The solution of many pharmacological and medical problems, such as rational drug design or the pathology of diseases associated with the mis-folding of proteins, requires a detailed understanding of the relation between chemical composition and structure of proteins. However, despite more than two decades of research, this so-called protein-folding problem has remained a hard computational task. This is because proteins in an all-atom representation are characterized by a rough energy landscape with a huge number of local minima separated by high energy barriers. Various numerical techniques exist that can alleviate this multiple minima problem. One popular example is parallel tempering (also known as replica exchange method) [1], a technique that was first introduced to protein studies in Ref. [2]. In its most common form, one considers an artificial system built up of N non-interacting copies of a molecule, each at a different temperature T i . In addition to standard Monte Carlo or molecular dynamics moves that affect only one copy, parallel tempering allows also the exchange of conformations between two copies i and j = i + 1 with probability w(C old → C new ) = min(1, exp(ΔβΔE)). The resulting random walk in temperature enables configurations to cross energy barriers and move out of local minima leading in this way to an enhanced sampling of lowenergy structures. Variants of parallel tempering introducing non-canonical weights have been proposed [2,3].Here, we introduce another variant of this idea, dubbed by us "model hopping" (MH), where as in the Hamilton Exchange method [4] or the Multi-Self-Overlap-Ensemble [5] the random walk in temperatures is replaced by one through an ensemble of models with slightly altered energy functions. For this we assume that the energy function can be separated in two terms: E = E A + aE B . As in parallel tempering, MH considers N non-interacting copies of the molecule, but copies are now exchanged according toHere, Δa = a j − a i and ΔE B = E B (C j ) − E B (C i ). Due to this exchange move configurations perform a random walk on a ladder of models with a 1 = 1 > a 2 > a 3 > …. > a N that differ by the relative contributions of E B to the total energy E of the molecule. For instance, barriers in the energy landscape of proteins often arise from van der Waals repulsion between atoms that come too close. Generalized-ensemble techniques circumvent the problem by performing a random walk in energy that allows crossing of these barriers. On the other hand, in MH the protein walks randomly up and down on a ladder of models with successively smaller contributions from the van der Waals energy. While the "physical" system is on one side of the ladder (at a 1 = 1), the (non-p...