It was a good article, thanks for writing it. But when you know you're addressing an ultra technical crowd, please leave out stuff like that, it distracts from very interesting content.
It was a simile to express the critical importance of latency of calculation and dispatch in the system; in a graspable form for the reader - when I don't really know their technical ability - as its a blog post about a game; rather than a technical paper in a journal. I did say "is like" ;-)
For example in the interest management; it is working out what custom messages to send to what players about each other and with 50k players in the same combat it needs to do this without it ballooning to 2.5Bn messages for a round of position updates - of which there are many per second per player; then convert these individual compressed output streams that are unique per player; and move on to the next set - and even then as stated in the article we are still at 267M messages a second.
