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\section*{Optimization Opportunity Analysis (2025-11-19)}

A bang-for-buck analysis conducted on 2025-11-19 ranked ten candidate
optimizations for the StarForth physics engine by impact-to-effort ratio.
The two highest-ranked items---decay slope inference (Opportunity~1) and
variance-based window width tuning (Opportunity~2)---were subsequently
implemented and validated; they now constitute Feedback Loops~6 and~5
respectively in the production architecture.

The remaining eight opportunities (decay rate design-of-experiments, rolling
window sizing, hotwords cache threshold tuning, binary-search validation, ML
prefetch model, NUMA placement, dictionary reorganization, and SIMD
acceleration) were assessed at lower priority. Of these, opportunities related
to the hotwords cache and rolling window sizing were addressed implicitly
through the DoE experimental program reported in the \textsc{ssrn} paper.
The ML prefetch, NUMA, and SIMD items were explicitly deferred.

%% TODO(bob): Confirm which of OPP 3--10 were formally closed vs.\ remain open
%% as future work. This document predates the final OPP report series.