  We investigate the possibility of generating initial conditions for
cosmological N-body simulations by simulating a system whose correlations at
thermal equilibrium approximate well those of cosmological density
perturbations. The system is an appropriately modified version of the standard
``one component plasma'' (OCP). We show first how a well-known semi-analytic
method can be used to determine the potential required to produce the desired
correlations, and then verify our results for some cosmological type spectra
with simulations of the full molecular dynamics. The advantage of the method,
compared to the standard one, is that it gives by construction an accurate
representation of both the real and reciprocal space correlation properties of
the theoretical model. Furthermore the distributions are also statistically
homogeneous and isotropic. We discuss briefly the modifications needed to
implement the method to produce configurations appropriate for large N-body
simulations in cosmology, and also the generation of initial velocities in this
context.
