  Moser & Tardos have developed a powerful algorithmic approach (henceforth
"MT") to the Lovasz Local Lemma (LLL); the basic operation done in MT and its
variants is a search for "bad" events in a current configuration. In the
initial stage of MT, the variables are set independently. We examine the
distributions on these variables which arise during intermediate stages of MT.
We show that these configurations have a more or less "random" form, building
further on the "MT-distribution" concept of Haeupler et al. in understanding
the (intermediate and) output distribution of MT. This has a variety of
algorithmic applications; the most important is that bad events can be found
relatively quickly, improving upon MT across the complexity spectrum: it makes
some polynomial-time algorithms sub-linear (e.g., for Latin transversals, which
are of basic combinatorial interest), gives lower-degree polynomial run-times
in some settings, transforms certain super-polynomial-time algorithms into
polynomial-time ones, and leads to Las Vegas algorithms for some coloring
problems for which only Monte Carlo algorithms were known.
  We show that in certain conditions when the LLL condition is violated, a
variant of the MT algorithm can still produce a distribution which avoids most
of the bad events. We show in some cases this MT variant can run faster than
the original MT algorithm itself, and develop the first-known criterion for the
case of the asymmetric LLL. This can be used to find partial Latin transversals
-- improving upon earlier bounds of Stein (1975) -- among other applications.
We furthermore give applications in enumeration, showing that most applications
(where we aim for all or most of the bad events to be avoided) have many more
solutions than known before by proving that the MT-distribution has "large"
min-entropy and hence that its support-size is large.
