  Extremal Optimization, a recently introduced meta-heuristic for hard
optimization problems, is analyzed on a simple model of jamming. The model is
motivated first by the problem of finding lowest energy configurations for a
disordered spin system on a fixed-valence graph. The numerical results for the
spin system exhibit the same phenomena found in all earlier studies of extremal
optimization, and our analytical results for the model reproduce many of these
features.
