A slit or narrow opening, especially one for receiving something, as a coin or letter. Also: a position or job, as the slot of chief copy editor.
In the movie National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation, Chevy Chase’s character gets caught up in gambling fever and goes on a losing streak to beat all losing streaks. While the odds are against winning at the slot machines, it’s still possible to play smart by understanding some basic probability and avoiding some of the many myths about slots.
Myth: Slots that are close to the entrance of a casino pay out more than those further away. Fact: It is a little harder to win the top jackpot on a machine that’s farther away, but the chances of hitting it aren’t significantly different.
Myth: A slot is a piece of the machine that holds a coin or paper that has been inserted by the player. Fact: Slots are a mechanical part of the machine and can be found throughout the cabinet.
In computer engineering, a slot is the operation issue and data path machinery that surrounds a set of execution units (also called functional units). A slot is an abstraction that reduces the complexity of programs that require multiple hardware resources by hiding the relationship between operations in the instruction stream and the pipeline that executes them. In very long instruction word (VLIW) computers, the concept is more commonly called a pipeline or an execute pipe.