Physical simulation is unique due to latency requirements. The impossibility of using the data center is the common denominator in high performance programming

Physical simulation is unique due to latency requirements. The impossibility of using the data center is the common denominator in high performance programming. In my field, Spark, functional programming for data parallelism, few if any problems of Moore's law ever truly eventuate. "Compute bottlenecks" are so uncommon. Databricks has almost no lines of Scala written, SQL/Python are "fast enough." Commoditization, "good enough" libraries, packaged in SQL/Python for the lowest common denominator. Carmack's genius of the inverse square misses the point. Carmack's genius was the video game Quake itself. The mathematical brilliance, the high performance programming, was genius applied to overcome a bottleneck. (And what temporary genius. Contrast Carmack with Unity). Originality, usefulness. Imagination meeting relevance, is the engine that powers software.