  Molecular dynamics simulations using semi-empirical potentials are examined
for three liquids to check the reliability of reverse Monte Carlo (RMC)
simulations to reproduce atomic configurations when only total pair correlation
functions (TPCF) are used as constraints. The local structures are determined
from a Voronoi tessellation of the ensemble and compared with the structures
obtained by RMC in terms of asphericity, volume, coordination number, Voronoi
index, and nearest-neighbor distance. It is found that in general the
distributions generated from RMC do not match the MD configurations, using the
$L^1$ (taxicab) distance as a metric, although in some cases a measure of
central tendency for the distribution did match. Since only TPCFs are typically
used to constrain the RMC simulations of experimental data, this study
establishes the limits on what can be learned by this analysis. It indicates
that caution should be used when interpreting RMC-generated structures using
few constraints since many structural quantities are not reproduced well.
