1. A method of operating at least one computational device as a decision machine to solve a problem having a solution dependent upon vectors derived from a set of features in a feature space, the method including operating said computational device to perform the steps of: (a) solving a minimization problem corresponding to an SVM quadratic programming formulation of the problem to thereby identify significant features of said set; and (b) solving the problem by operation of the decision machine in a reduced number of computational steps based on the identification of the significant features.