Are 100,000 "SNPs" Useless?

Useless Actions Are Useful

Planning as heuristic search is a powerful approach to solving domain independent planning problems. In recent years, various successful heuristics and planners like FF, LPG, FAST DOWNWARD or SGPLAN have been proposed in this context. However, as heuristics only estimate the distance to goal states, a general problem of heuristic search is the existence of plateaus in the search space topology ...

Useless Disinfection

A useless raffle.

A mailed questionnaire was sent to 2712 subjects asking about respiratory symptoms, and a raffle for three prizes of 50 pounds, 30 pounds, and 20 pounds was organised. The response rate in the 1762 who were told about the raffle was no higher than for 950 subjects who served as controls.

Stop Reading (Useless Parts)!

Information overload is one of the biggest problems currently omnipresent in the word largest network, the Internet. No general solution exists therefore it is important to handle this problem at least in certain areas. Large collections of articles are available to the users of the Internet. Since technology is very easy to handle for information providers, literally every person who has acces...

Parity is Positively Useless

We give the first examples of non-trivially positively-useless predicates subject only to P 6= NP. In particular, for every constraint function Q : {−1, 1}4 → R, we construct Contraint-SatisfactionProblem (CSP) instances without negations which have value at least 1 − ε when evaluted for the arity-four odd-parity predicate, yet it is NP-hard to find a solution with value significantly better th...