PERM is the most efficient approach for solving protein folding problem based on simple lattice model. In this article a personification explanation of PERM is proposed. A new version of PERM, population control algorithm with two main improvements is presented: one is that it is able to redefine the weight and its predicted value in PERM, and the other is that it is able to unify the calculation of weight when choosing possible branches. The improved PERM is more efficient than the previous version; specifically it can find the known lowest energy states for the four well-known difficult instances and is generally several to hundreds times faster than PERM. It is noteworthy that with the improved PERM we found new lowest energy configurations of three of the four difficult problems missed in previous papers.