Reminds me of the opening in a war story in the "Algorithm Design Manual."

> That look in his eyes should have warned me even before he started talking. “We want to use a parallel supercomputer for a numerical calculation up to 1,000,000,000, but we need a faster algorithm to do it.” I’d seen that distant look before. Eyes dulled from too much exposure to the raw horsepower of supercomputers - machines so fast that brute force seemed to eliminate the need for clever algorithms; at least until the problems got hard enough.