However, as David Ricardo observed almost 200 years ago, economic optimisation is about comparative advantage.
DemandTec, an American specialist, says that price optimisation has boosted some supermarkets' gross profits by over 15%.
Designing so many microstructures manually would be a huge task, so the researchers apply an optimisation program, called a genetic algorithm, instead.
This additional optimisation takes extra time, but the fact that the code will subsequently run faster more than makes up for it.
There will be an incentive for businesses to create pages on Facebook and learn the new art of GSO - Graph Search Optimisation.
One example: companies like Trada have cunningly opened up search engine optimisation to crowdsourced labor but there is much more going on.
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He is talking to Calibrated Diamonds, a company based in Johannesburg, South Africa, about combining his optimisation techniques with an advanced laser-cutting system.
The advantage of doing this translation and manipulation in software, rather than in hardware, is that far more complex kinds of optimisation are possible.
Even without chipset-specific optimisation, Ubuntu performs beautifully on entry level hardware.
Other sensors monitor traffic conditions allowing real-time optimisation of traffic flow.
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Just as optimisation algorithms come in handy when people are swamped by vast numbers of permutations, so statistical algorithms help firms to grapple with complex datasets.
The university said that while significant efforts were being made in early stage drug discovery, there was a bottleneck when it came to the lead optimisation stage of molecules targeting these so called "neglected" diseases.
In addition, the "A-Drive" can be extended for enterprise storage applications, reducing power consumption by up to 50%, resulting in greener and more efficient data centres with better optimisation of the already limited rack space.
Lead optimisation is a key stage in the drug discovery process, where early leads are improved through cycles of design, synthesis and testing to identify potential drugs which are suitable for testing in a clinical setting.
While the hardware specs have had a modest bump, the majority of the unveiling focused on software optimisation, which may lead to question as to how close to the average Android flavor Samsung is going to stay.
When a stone is identified as a borderline case between two grades, the system uses an optimisation technique, called a genetic algorithm, to explore the different ways in which the stone could be cut to maximise its value.
To develop these algorithms the 60 researchers involved used techniques that include game theory (in which agents have to overcome barriers to collaboration in order to get the best outcome), probabilistic modelling (which is employed to predict missing data and reduce uncertainty) and optimisation techniques (which can provide means of making decisions when communications between agents are limited).
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