The subject of this book is best illustrated by the following scenario. Suppose that you are employed in the halls of industry. More than a decade ago your company entered the highly competitive "bandersnatch" market. While other companies thought that bandersnatch design was an intractable problem, and spent millions on supercomputers to search for possible designs, your company had the foresight to employ a few theoretical computer scientists. They discovered that there was a feasible algorithm for designing a bandersnatch directly from its specification. Your company can take an n-word specification of a bandersnatch and, in about n3 steps, can test if the specification is reasonable and design an optimal bandersnatch that meets it. With your algorithm, a typical 15,000 word bandersnatch specification takes about one month to design. Construction only takes a week, so design dominates the bandersnatch building process. Your competitors, on the other hand, do not have a fast algorithm for producing optimal bandersnatch designs. The best that they can do is an exhaustive search through the approximately 2n/150 possible different designs that meet the specification looking for the best one. Since this exhaustive search for the typical size of specification would take a while (say, 1016 years, assuming one design per microsecond) your competitors must be content with the suboptimal designs that they can produce in about the same time as you. At least that was until yesterday. Seeing the value of research, your competition formed a consortium and also invested in computer science. They too have discovered the feasible optimal bandersnatch design algorithm. Since design dominates the production process, your bosses decide that the way to regain your company's competitive advantage is to reduce the design time. They give you the task of dramatically speeding up the design process. Like most modern computer scientists you begin working on the problem by reading the news on the Net. One day an ad catches your eye. Sensing its corporate salvation, your company orders one of the machines. When it arrives you unpack it and discover that its architecture is very simple.