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by amelius 333 days ago
But aren't the programs given access to the problem data _after_ the program has been compiled?
3 comments

Yeah, but they didn't precompute the solution for that specific program data, they precomputed the solution for all possible ones, and then selected the correct one when the program data was provided.
Sure, but the input might be bounded/finite, or the operations needed similarly constrained (e.g. trigonometry operations). Then you can offload lots of the computation to the compilation, sometimes all of it.
There are plenty of opportunities to precompute _everything_ for a certain class of problems.