Gadget

A gadget is a smalltool such as a machine that has a particular function, but is often thought of as a novelty. Gadgets are sometimes referred to as gizmos. Gizmos in particular are a bit different than gadgets. Gadgets in particular are small tools powered by electronic principles (a circuit board).

History

The origins of the word "gadget" trace back to the 19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is anecdotal (not necessarily true) evidence for the use of "gadget" as a placeholder name for a technical item whose precise name one can't remember since the 1850s; with Robert Brown's 1886 book Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy’s log of a voyage out and home in a China tea-clipper containing the earliest known usage in print. The etymology of the word is disputed.

A widely circulated story holds that the word gadget was "invented" when Gaget, Gauthier & Cie, the company behind the repoussé construction of the Statue of Liberty (1886), made a small-scale version of the monument and named it after their firm; however this contradicts the evidence that the word was already used before in nautical circles, and the fact that it did not become popular, at least in the USA, until after World War I. Other sources cite a derivation from the French gâchette which has been applied to various pieces of a firing mechanism, or the French gagée, a small tool or accessory.

Suikoden (video game)

Suikoden (Japanese: 幻想水滸伝, Hepburn: Gensō Suikoden,  listen ) is a role-playing game published by Konami as the first installment of the Suikoden series. Developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, it was released initially in 1995 for the PlayStation in Japan. North American and British releases followed one year later, and a mainland European release came the following March. The game was also released for the Sega Saturn in 1998 only in Japan, and for Microsoft Windows in 1998 in Japan. On December 22, 2008, Suikoden was made available on the PlayStation Store for use on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles.

The game centers on the political struggles of the Scarlet Moon Empire. The player controls the son of a Scarlet Moon Empire general who is destined to seek out 108 warriors (referred to as the 108 Stars of Destiny) in order to revolt against the corrupt sovereign state and bring peace to a war-torn land. The game is loosely based on the Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan, and features a vast array of characters both controllable and not, with over ninety characters usable in combat and many more able to help or hinder the hero in a variety of ways.

Gadget (computer science)

In computational complexity theory, a gadget is a subset of a problem instance that simulates the behavior of one of the fundamental units of a different computational problem. Gadgets are typically used to construct reductions from one computational problem to another, as part of proofs of NP-completeness or other types of computational hardness. The component design technique is a method for constructing reductions by using gadgets.

Szabó (2009) traces the use of gadgets to a 1954 paper in graph theory by W. T. Tutte, in which Tutte provided gadgets for reducing the problem of finding a subgraph with given degree constraints to a perfect matching problem. However, the "gadget" terminology has a later origin, and does not appear in Tutte's paper.

Example

Many NP-completeness proofs are based on many-one reductions from 3-satisfiability, the problem of finding a satisfying assignment to a Boolean formula that is a conjunction (Boolean and) of clauses, each clause being the disjunction (Boolean or) of three terms, and each term being a Boolean variable or its negation. A reduction from this problem to a hard problem on undirected graphs, such as the Hamiltonian cycle problem or graph coloring, would typically be based on gadgets in the form of subgraphs that simulate the behavior of the variables and clauses of a given 3-satisfiability instance. These gadgets would then be glued together to form a single graph, a hard instance for the graph problem in consideration.

Illusion (disambiguation)

An illusion is an error in perception such as an optical illusion or auditory illusion.

Illusion or Illusions may also refer to:

Books and theatre

Film

Illusions (Thomas Bergersen album)

Illusions (formerly called "Nemesis II") is a stand-alone production album created by Thomas J. Bergersen from Two Steps From Hell, and was released in 2011. It features vocal performances by Vladislava Vasileva, Elitsa Todorova, Merethe Soltvedt, Kate St. Pierre, Jenifer Thigpen and Colin O'Malley and samples from Troels Brun Folmann's Tonehammer library, as well as instrumental performances by the cellist Tina Guo and the Capellen Orchestra. The CD contains 19 tracks. The album cover and artwork are designed by Jesper Krijgsman. The album is available for download on iTunes, Amazon and CDBaby. The CD has been released physically on March 13, 2012.

On January 24, 2013 Illusions was released on ExtremeMusic.com to clients promoting motion picture advertising. This version contains 18 alternate versions of many pieces, which makes 37 tracks in total.

Track listing

Use in media

Thomas Bergersen's music has been licensed for several trailers.

Illusions (Bach novel)

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah is a novel by writer and pilot Richard Bach. First published in 1977, the story questions the reader's view of reality, proposing that what we call reality is merely an illusion we create for learning and enjoyment. Illusions was the author's followup to 1970's Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Plot

With some similarity to Nevil Shute's 1951 novel, Round the Bend, Illusions revolves around two barnstorming pilots who meet in a field in midwest America. The two main characters enter into a teacher-student relationship that explains the concept that the world that we inhabit is illusory, as well as the underlying reality behind it:

Donald P. Shimoda is a messiah who quits his job after deciding that people value the showbiz-like performance of miracles and want to be entertained by those miracles more than to understand the message behind them. He meets Richard, a fellow barn-storming pilot and begins to pass on his knowledge to him, even teaching Richard to perform "miracles" of his own.