Procedural generation is something the demoscene has essentially specialised in for several decades, but I see no mention of it in the article. The demoscene has also done so using several orders of magnitude less computing resources than mentioned here, so I think everyone else has a lot to learn from them.
Here's a memorable intro, from 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31636482
Earlier than that, another famous 64k from 2000:
http://www.theproduct.de/index.html