What Is a Slot?

A narrow depression, groove, notch, or opening, especially one for receiving or admitting something, as a keyway in a door or the slit for coins in a vending machine. A position in a group, series, or sequence: His show is in the eight o’clock slot on Thursdays.

An area or position in which something can be inserted: He put his keys into the door slot. A piece of equipment into which something can be fitted: He tried to slide the board into the slot on the wall. A period of time: I have to be at work at the opening of the slot.

In computing, a slot is an empty space on a motherboard that can hold an expansion card such as an ISA (Industry Standard Architecture), PCI (peripheral component interconnect), or AGP (accelerated graphics port). A CPU slot is also known as a PCI slot. A slots location is indicated on the bottom of the motherboard.

From the early sixties until the late seventies, mechanical electromechanical slots were common in casinos and gambling halls. However, electronic technology soon made them obsolete, and they were replaced by video games based on random number generators. While these machines are still popular today, they have evolved from the skeuomorphic design of the old mechanical ones to include more advanced video graphics and gameplay options.

Many modern casino venues have slots as well, but they do not use a lever or other mechanical mechanisms to trigger the game. Instead, they employ computerized random number generators to determine the outcome of a spin. Many modern slots also have a variety of additional features, such as bonus rounds and jackpots.

The earliest slot machines were Class 2, which used a fixed series of predetermined outcomes. More recently, machines have been upgraded to Class 3 with a random number generator that produces different results every time. The newer machines are more reliable and produce higher payouts than their mechanical counterparts.

You can configure BigQuery to automatically borrow and release excess capacity as needed. When you submit a workload, the slot recommender analyzes the workload’s historical performance and finds the minimum incremental value of the maximum reservation size that can elevate job performance by at least 5%. The recommendation is then compared to your existing maximum reservation size to identify the optimal slot value.

To create a custom slot type, click Add Slot Type on the Slots page or in the left pane of the UI. Select Regular Expression as the slot type, enter a name for the custom slot type, and then type a regular expression that maps values to slots. You can then select this custom slot type for an utterance. For example, you can use the regex pattern flight_code to map flight codes to slots for a travel bot. You can also create a custom slot that matches any numeric value by selecting Builtin: Numeric as the slot type. However, using a custom slot for a numeric value may lead to unpredictable results if the value changes over time.