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A spin glass has frozen, irregular local spin magnetization without the periodic magnetic order of a simple ferromagnet or antiferromagnet. Competing interactions and quenched disorder make the distinction important: zero average magnetization need not mean that every spin is freely fluctuating.^[ref]

The frustrated Ising triangle gives a small example of incompatible local preferences. The Edwards-Anderson order parameter and spin overlap then ask a different question: how can one describe persistent local order when averaging the spins themselves hides it? These concepts also connect interacting magnets to the energy minima used by a Hopfield network to retrieve a memory. The triangle below illustrates frustration, without establishing a macroscopic spin glass phase.

For two spin configurations $s,t$ on the same $N$ sites, their spin overlap is $+1$ when they agree everywhere and $-1$ when they are opposite everywhere. Two independent canonical ensemble draws must use the same quenched disorder. Otherwise their comparison mixes changes of thermal state with changes of material sample.

An original finite example uses the six equally weighted ground states of the frustrated Ising triangle. For each first configuration, the second has one identical choice, one fully reversed choice, two choices differing at one site and two differing at two sites. Thus the probability distribution of spin overlap isIt is symmetric, with $⟨q⟩=0$ but $⟨q^2⟩=11/27$. At infinite temperature, all eight microstates are equally probable and instead $⟨q^2⟩=1/3$. This computable change in similarity statistics is a finite-model fact, not evidence for replica symmetry breaking.