I first used this quote when referring to the z-buffering used in ID first person shooter Castle Wolfenstein. While not strictly a hash table, its a philosophy of “the audacity of scale” that I have maintained since my demo coding days.

Q: How did you get that so fast?

A: A Lookup table!

The original BSCAL execution cache and the WebGod application server, the MetaWrap server object mutation event handler, the nanotech audio wavetracer all used this approach with great benefit.

This saying is fundamentally true, because any deterministic computation is input for a set of outputs, and thus all computation could be simulated with a pre-calculated cache of the result for every input.