  The statistical physics approach to the number partioning problem, a
classical NP-hard problem, is both simple and rewarding. Very basic notions and
methods from statistical mechanics are enough to obtain analytical results for
the phase boundary that separates the ``easy-to-solve'' from the
``hard-to-solve'' phase of the NPP as well as for the probability distributions
of the optimal and sub-optimal solutions. In addition, it can be shown that
solving a number partioning problem of size $N$ to some extent corresponds to
locating the minimum in an unsorted list of $\bigo{2^N}$ numbers. Considering
this correspondence it is not surprising that known heuristics for the
partitioning problem are not significantly better than simple random search.
