This is a highly theoretical question for which there is no good answer. I hope it is a good discussion and I hope it is okay for me to ask.

In the 1980s I worked for an aircraft manufacturer. They built large aircraft, some of the largest. There was an application they called Tumbledown. It would find hierarchical errors, such as an assembly being a component of itself. It would start at the top of the design and tumble down. At that time even the most advanced computers were not capable of processing the entire aircraft design in real time, at the time that the engineer updated the design using CAD, so Tumbledown would be run overnight.

What are the chances I could have designed a methodology that was more efficient and could detect such an error in real time?