Energy landscape of social balance.

@article{Marvel2009EnergyLO,
  title={Energy landscape of social balance.},
  author={Seth A. Marvel and Steven H. Strogatz and Jon M. Kleinberg},
  journal={Physical review letters},
  year={2009},
  volume={103 19},
  pages={
          198701
        }
}
We model a close-knit community of friends and enemies as a fully connected network with positive and negative signs on its edges. Theories from social psychology suggest that certain sign patterns are more stable than others. This notion of social "balance" allows us to define an energy landscape for such networks. Its structure is complex: numerical experiments reveal a landscape dimpled with local minima of widely varying energy levels. We derive rigorous bounds on the energies of these… 
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