[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.