The contact graph of an arbitrary finite packing of unit balls is the graph whose vertices correspond to the packing elements and whose two vertices are connected by an edge if the corresponding two packing elements touch each other. The cardinality of the edge set of the contact graph gives the number of touching pairs, the number of 3-cycles in the contact graph gives the number of touching triplets, and the number of tetrahedrons in the contact graph gives the number of touching quadruples (in general for a contact graph associated with a sphere packing in n dimensions that the cardinality of the set of n-simplices in the contact graph gives the number of touching (n + 1)-tuples in the sphere packing). In the case of 3-dimensional Euclidean space, non-trivial upper bounds on the number of touching pairs, triplets, and quadruples were proved by Karoly Bezdek and Samuel Reid at the University of Calgary.
The problem of finding the arrangement of n identical spheres that maximizes the number of contact points between the spheres is known as the "sticky-sphere problem". The maximum is known for n ≤ 11, and only conjectural values are known for larger n.