Marching Events: What does iCalendar have to do with ray marching?

Lots of hospitality booking and pricing engines, for instance, require materialization of complex rules: if suppliers have rules that say "if the checkin is on these 3 days of each week add a price multiplier, which stacks with the holiday pricing event that happens every year, but only if you're a certain number of days out from check-in" you need to be able to render this for arbitrary date ranges to provide pricing calendars.

And you can use simple iteration if you want to render for a single property - but what if you want to render a queried week's pricing across a massive corpus of units, where every millisecond of latency is a lost conversion opportunity? And where any supplier could change their rules at any time? And where length-of-stay and per-guest pricing might come into play, adding more dimensions that make full materialization hard to do?

(Google, for instance, has something akin to this problem, in how it integrates with hotel suppliers using https://developers.google.com/hotels/hotel-prices/dev-guide/... .)

You might even think, in this context: how can I represent the rules on a GPU or other system with limited working memory, and be able to render search results the way I'd render tiles?

Then things like the OP's post become vital considerations, and far from just simple analogies!

Our dataset wasn't so large as to warrant experimenting with GPUs - `cost(extraCpu) < cost(developerExperimentingWithGpus)` - but the CPU implementation got a lot of love; it was mostly engineering-based work, though ("how to load stuff from the disk effectively", "how to make it multi-threaded" etc.), not math-based work ("if we represented prices using $someFancyStructure, we could ...").

I like when seemingly engineering-oriented problems turn out to be way more approachable once you apply / invent / adjust some math foundations, e.g. like with Feldera (https://sigmodrecord.org/publications/sigmodRecord/2403/pdfs...) - wouldn't figure something like this myself in a hundred years, I'd just probably apply maps on top of caches on top of whatever else I could pile until it works!