In this paper, we study the Crisanti-Sommers variational problem, which is a variational formula for the free energy of spherical mixed

p

-spin glasses. We begin by computing the dual of this problem using a min-max argument. We find that the dual is a 1D problem of obstacle type, where the obstacle is related to the covariance structure of the underlying process. This approach yields an alternative way to understand Replica Symmetry Breaking at the level of the variational problem through topological properties of the coincidence set of the optimal dual variable. Using this duality, we give an algorithm to reduce this a priori infinite dimensional variational problem to a finite dimensional one, thereby confining all possible forms of Replica Symmetry Breaking in these models to a finite parameter family. These results complement the authors’ related results for the low temperature

\Gamma

-limit of this variational problem. We briefly discuss the analysis of the Replica Symmetric phase using this approach.

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