Simulations of ground state fluctuations in mean-field Ising spin glasses

The scaling of fluctuations in the distribution of ground state energies or costs with the system size N for Ising spin glasses is considered using an extensive set of simulations with the extremal optimization heuristic across a range of different models on sparse and dense graphs. These models exhibit very diverse behaviors, and an asymptotic extrapolation is often complicated by higher-order corrections in size. The clearest picture, in fact, emerges from the study of graph bipartitioning, a combinatorial optimization problem closely related to spin glasses. Asides from two-spin interactions with discrete bonds, we also consider problems with Gaussian bonds and three-spin interactions, which behave quite differently.