A slot is a narrow depression, notch, groove, or opening, especially one for receiving something, as a coin or a letter. It can also refer to a period of time within a schedule or program: Her TV show is scheduled for the eight o’clock slot.
A casino slot machine is a type of gambling machine that pays out winnings according to the pay table on its face or, in the case of video slots, on a screen. In order to play the machine, a player inserts cash or, in “ticket-in, ticket-out” machines, a paper ticket with a barcode, into a slot on the machine. The machine then activates, rotating the reels and moving symbols across them to re-arrange them. When a matching combination of symbols appears on the machine’s pay line, the player receives credits based on the payout percentage listed in the pay table.
Modern electromechanical slot machines do not have tilt switches, but if the machine is “tilting”, it may trigger a fault that prevents it from paying out or stopping. Regardless of what causes a machine to “tilt”, any kind of technical fault that prevents the machine from functioning as intended is referred to as a “tilt”. This can include any kind of physical (door switch out of place, out of paper) or electrical (reel motor failure) fault. In some jurisdictions, it is illegal for casinos to adjust the probability of a machine to make it appear to be due to win.
In computer science, a slot is a reserved portion of memory that is allocated to an application. This allocation is based on a number of factors, including the application’s memory requirements and the amount of available memory. For example, an application might use only a small fraction of the total available memory, but it might require more than 1 megabyte of RAM. In this scenario, the application would be allocated a large number of small slots in the system’s memory, each holding a few megabytes of memory.
A slot in a Google Cloud database is a reserved capacity that can be used to store data. Slots can be re-allocated or shared among multiple applications and are reported in the database log file as part of the transaction log. In addition, slots can be bounded by a range and a maximum size to limit data loss in the event of a crash or other unplanned downtime. Additionally, excess capacity resulting from slots being bounded or shared can be temporarily borrowed to reduce future latency. This feature is called preemptive slot borrowing.