The method has been used to compute properties of ground states in many condensed matter and optimization problems.
Initially invented to deal with the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the cavity method has shown wider applicability.
The application of the resulting approximation, along with an assumption that certain observables are self-averaging, yields a self-consistency equation for the statistics of the added constituents.
The cavity method has proved useful in solving optimization problems such as k-satisfiability and graph coloring.
It has yielded not only ground states energy predictions in the average case but has also inspired algorithmic methods.