"The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it"
I don't think any irony or toleration is going on here, at least not more so than the players in Madden "tolerate" being forced to play football again and again. The players in Madden also fail to express concern about overpopulation but I think that's just the nature of a limited simulation. I'd love to play more sophisticated games, but SimCity just isn't there yet.
It makes me wonder if it was the programmers' intention to define success at playing the game by achieving construction of a hugely morose, sub-human, megalopolis where personal freedom (cars, entertainment venues) and basic social needs (education, safety from fire, health) were simply eliminated. Would have made a great propaganda tool to fight communism in the 50's...
I am always amazed when people use games to create something of value, something more than just fun, and prove how there are game systems out there that are really interesting from other standpoints, not just the entertainment part. I have seen other projects like this - of people creating really impressive in-game cities, usually with some version of SimCity. Also, various AI implementations for Starcraft and similar games come to mind.
The article doesn't say, but it looks like SimCity 3000. I haven't kept up with the more recent iterations of the game, but the complexity of the simulation seemed to increase with each new release (2000 added a water system, and 3000 added garbage, among other things); I'd be curious to see how this solution's complexity compares to those in the other games.
Perhaps more interesting would be how the optimization was performed. If I remember correctly, the manual from the original SimCity hinted at formulas used in the underlying simulation; I'm sure some dedicated players have reverse engineered such information for the newer games.
SimCity 4 added significantly more complex transportation simulations (particularly in the expansion) - but was more or less handicapped for performance reasons (pathfinding only allowed movement towards the destination... conveniently ignoring the subway stop right behind the Sim).
Popular (almost de facto standard for SimCity fans) mods have sprung up to correct this, and with modern hardware there is really no performance hit.
Transportation is now, IMHO, the toughest part of the simulation - even fixing their pathfinding, it's still wildly unpredictable what your sims will do, and creating a mega-city generates a lot of congestion that so far I've been unable to avoid.
It looks like the creator of Magnasanti optimized his solution by hand using pencil and paper, first finding modular arrangements that worked well, then assembling them in a predetermined overall design ("inspired by the Wheel of Life and Death"), which makes this more of an art project than optimization exercise. I wouldn't be surprised if there were still better solutions that sacrifice, for example, aesthetics or regularity.
I once "won" SimCity 2000 by having my hundreds of launch arcologies all take off. Unfortunately I was dealing with the plumbing at the time and so I missed it all. I just saw several squares crumble one after the other and couldn't switch modes until the show was over.
The old Lemonade simulation on Apple computers had such an optimal solution. Unfortunately, it was relatively easy to find. (Much to the chagrin of my teacher, who tried to use it to teach economics and business to my grade school class!)
I don't think any irony or toleration is going on here, at least not more so than the players in Madden "tolerate" being forced to play football again and again. The players in Madden also fail to express concern about overpopulation but I think that's just the nature of a limited simulation. I'd love to play more sophisticated games, but SimCity just isn't there yet.