A slit or narrow opening, especially one for receiving something such as a coin or a letter. Also: 1. A position or time available to do something. (As in, “I’m available at this slot” or, more commonly, “The meeting’s scheduled for this slot.”) 2. The space in a container into which a bolt or lock is placed. (As in, “The key fit perfectly in the slot of the door” or, more colloquially, “The car seat belt slotted right into place easily.”)
3. A space in a computer where an operation is scheduled to be executed, often alongside other operations in a pipeline. (As in, “I’m working on this task at the same time as someone else. We’re sharing a slot.”) 4. A figurative place or position, as in “She found herself in the midst of the crowd” or, more commonly, “He sat in the center of the table.”
In the movie National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation, Chevy Chase’s character Clark W. Griswold is consumed with gambling fever and loses more money than his father ever imagined possible at the slot machine, jokingly known as the “one-armed bandit.” But what exactly is a slot machine? What are the odds of hitting a winning combination?
The most common type of slot is a mechanical device that accepts cash or, in the case of “ticket-in, ticket-out” machines, paper tickets with barcodes. The machine then activates reels that spin and stop to rearrange symbols, triggering winning combinations and earning credits based on the payout table displayed on its face. The symbols vary depending on the theme of the slot machine, but classics include fruits, bells, and stylized lucky sevens.
Modern slot machines use microprocessors to assign a different probability to each symbol on every reel, making it appear that certain symbols are closer together than others. This can lead to players being fooled into thinking they are more likely to hit a winning combination than is actually the case. To test these machines, testers feed a dummy bill with a unique ID to the slot machine and observe how it behaves. If the currency is valid, the slot machine should reject it; if not, it should accept it.
A slot is a dynamic placeholder on a Web page that either waits for content to be inserted into it (a passive slot) or actively calls for it to be inserted into it (“an active slot”). It is filled with content dictated by a scenario using an Add Items to Slot action or by a targeter using the Fill Slots With Targeters action. In addition to slot functionality, the ACC also includes a renderer that specifies how the slot’s contents should be presented to the end user.