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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 10 declined, 5 accepted (15 total, 33.33% accepted)

Math

Submission + - An Optical Solution For an NP-Complete problem? (opticsexpress.org)

6 writes: Tobias Haist and Wolfgang Osten have proposed a novel idea for solving the traveling salesman problem...

We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.

The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Psychology, design and economics of slot-machines (boingboing.net)

6 writes: "from the article... "Stanford design prof Michael Shanks has an online course unit about the design, politics, sociology and economics of slot machines that is flat-out fascinating, especially the manipulative psychology of slot and casino design. The layout also takes advantage of the differences between slot and table players. In general, table players do not like the noise of slot machines because they find it distracting. In addition, they may sometimes play a few rounds on slot machines spontaneously, but obviously prefer table playing. At the same time, however, spouses or partners of table players will often wile away time playing at a nearby slot machine. Thus casinos are planned such that there are slot machines lining walkways around tables. However, these slots are always tight. This cuts down on the noise and distraction to table players, and makes sense because the majority of players on these machines are playing spontaneously, with little expectation of winning. This demonstrates to what degree casino layouts are optimized — in this case, to the point that a complex system is implemented simply to clean up loose change from spontaneous players. "

the article on Boing-Boing

Design Class on Slot Machines"

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