  It is essential to know the arrangement of the atoms in a material in order
to compute and understand its properties. Searching for stable structures of
materials using first-principles electronic structure methods, such as density
functional theory (DFT), is a rapidly growing field. Here we describe our
simple, elegant and powerful approach to searching for structures with DFT
which we call ab initio random structure searching (AIRSS). Applications to
discovering structures of solids, point defects, surfaces, and clusters are
reviewed. New results for iron clusters on graphene, silicon clusters,
polymeric nitrogen, hydrogen-rich lithium hydrides, and boron are presented.
