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The physics of custody

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Abstract

Divorced individuals face complex situations when they have children with different ex-partners, or even more, when their new partners have children of their own. In such cases, and when kids spend every other weekend with each parent, a practical problem emerges: is it possible to have such a custody arrangement that every couple has either all of the kids together or no kids at all? We show that in general, it is not possible, but that the number of couples that do can be maximized. The problem turns out to be equivalent to finding the ground state of a spin glass system, which is known to be equivalent to what is called a weighted max-cut problem in graph theory, and hence it is NP-complete.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Andres Bello, Av. República 252, 8370251, Santiago, Chile

    Andrés Gomberoff

  2. Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Víctor Muñoz

  3. Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Andres Bello, Av. República 252, 8370251, Santiago, Chile

    Pierre Paul Romagnoli

Authors
  1. Andrés Gomberoff
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  2. Víctor Muñoz
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  3. Pierre Paul Romagnoli
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Correspondence to Andrés Gomberoff.

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Gomberoff, A., Muñoz, V. & Romagnoli, P.P. The physics of custody. Eur. Phys. J. B 87, 37 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2014-40666-7

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