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Published · transcript-backed

Tim Sweeney: belief

30 Apr 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming

“I think our brains have vastly more horsepower than we’re able to directly access by thinking of what code to type next.”

— Tim Sweeney

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Tim Sweeney
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
30 Apr 2025
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…Can you actually speak to that, the 30-hour session? I mean, this is not, from everything I know about computational geometry, doing this kind of thing from your perspective is not, that’s not easy. What is it? The uncertainty, the open questions involved. I mean, even just on the algorithm front, how to do that efficiently and then plus, the usual programming thing of debugging, like suffering through the trickiness of it. We don’t have really, at that time, you don’t have the tooling to really visualize everything that’s going on really well. You’re probably using some crappy editor, I mean, there’s just a lot of friction here, so the 30 hour session is one that’s probably rough. It’s a rough one. Your brain works in different ways and depending on your state, right? There are some things that require really working on a problem fresh, where you’ve put together a bunch of logical pieces and now you just need to write a whole lot of code to make it all work together and plumb a whole lot of data between a whole lot of different algorithms. I think our brains have vastly more horsepower than we’re able to directly access by thinking of what code to type next. After you’ve been working for a very long time, you can get into a sleep-deprived state where you have much more direct access to that low-level knowledge. That’s great.…

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