A Bound on the Sum of Weighted Pairwise Distances of Points Constrained to Balls

Abstract

We consider the problem of choosing Euclidean points to maximize the sum of their weighted pairwise distances, when each point is constrained to a ball centered at the origin. We derive a dual minimization problem and show strong duality holds (i.e., the resulting upper bound is tight) when some locally optimal configuration of points is affinely independent. We sketch a polynomial time algorithm for finding a near-optimal set of points.

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