A new Yale School of Public Health study found that slot machines, or "one-armed bandits", may offer a clue to how AIDS programs can better locate persons living with undiagnosed HIV infection. "When you walk into a casino and see a row of slot machines how do you decide which one to play and when it's time to switch to another? What's the best strategy to maximize your winnings?" asks Gregg Gonsalves, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale, and lead author on the paper published in Medical Decision Making. "Mathematicians have created strategies called "bandit" algorithms to answer these questions - and we’ve used one of them as the basis for our approach to HIV testing."
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Published: Wednesday, August 2, 2017
