[andrewingram]

If it were just games, I think you'd be right in there being a relatively low value cap. Gaming is a huge industry, but the issue with persistent words is that to provide value, they need to have addicted users. If i'm not going to keep logging into a game, do I really care that it's supporting a huge number of users or that a tree I felled a year ago is still decaying on the floor somewhere?

There's a low upper limit to how many such games an individual would be willing to invest in (a number not far off 1?). Some MMORPG players will play a few of them, but I suspect most will focus on just one.

I think the real value of this tech lies in its applications outside of gaming, namely huge-scale simulations. There's plenty of opportunity for lucrative contracts with governments, academia, and R&D departments.

[UK-AL]

Why do simulations have to be real time online systems?

Most simulations don't work like that at all.

[andrewingram]

No idea to be honest, but i'll speculate about an application of this:

Let's say you're simulating an ant colony, there's going to be a lot of empty space, there'll be choke points with a high number of interactions, and quiet areas with not much going on. You could do a totally offline simulation, and it'll take an unpredictable amount of time to do some number of ticks - because the complexity of each tick is unknowable ahead of time. But if you want reasonable guarantees about how long a simulation will take to run (and assuming there's an upper bound to the complexity), being able to easily and automatically scale up the computing power would be very valuable.

So the utility isn't restricted to real-time, but more generally about having a predictable execution time per tick regardless of simulation complexity.

Of course, this is all speculation, I'd love to hear some real world applications of this.

[Banderly]

I also want to know the answer to this.

Should we expect weather forecasters to ditch all their existing infrastructure and move to improbable?

Something doesn't add up; simulations are not MMOs.