Dominoes are a game of chance and skill where players place tiles edge to edge against one another. Each domino has a set of values on the ends (called spots or pips) that are added together for scoring purposes. A domino is divided into two squares by a line or ridge, with one side bearing an arrangement of dots and the other blank or identically patterned. The number of pips on the exposed sides of the domino is called its rank or weight, with higher numbers indicating more value. A domino may belong to more than one suit, with each suit representing a different set of scores.
The most common use of domino involves positional games. In these, each player in turn places a domino on its edge against an adjacent tile with matching value – for example, 5 to 5, 6 to 6, etc. This starts a chain that continues in a snake-like pattern based on the whims and limitations of the space on which the game is played.
This is a great way to get children interested in the mechanics of gravity and the laws of motion. As the chain begins to grow, it becomes possible to watch the dominoes tumbling down. Physicists have found that the force of gravity can knock down objects about 1.5 times their size if they are standing upright and subjected to the pull of gravity. When you stand a domino upright, it stores energy in the form of potential energy, and when it falls, this is converted to kinetic energy.
Domino’s has also used the power of the domino effect to address its biggest problem: employee turnover. The company has looked to behavioral theory to create a management approach that is less hierarchical than the traditional model, and which encourages employees to feel more ownership of the business.
For many companies, the most significant challenge is to make their data analytics models easier to manage and share with internal stakeholders. Unfortunately, tools that facilitate best practices from software engineering have not yet matured to match the needs of data scientists. As a result, data analysis teams either awkwardly graft tools onto their workflows or build custom solutions.
Domino is built to meet these challenges and accelerate modern analytical workflows. With Domino, you can centralize your execution and model storage, enabling you to easily run models across a variety of hardware and schedule them as recurring jobs that automatically scale. You can also deploy models as REST API endpoints, exposing them to your business processes through a clean interface. And you can even build lightweight self-service web forms on top of your model, allowing human consumers to interactively run the model with their own parameter values and see how it behaves. This is a powerful combination of power and simplicity that enables you to get more out of your data analytics investment.
