Taavet Hinrikus x Herman Narula

Upstarts is a series in which key figures from The WIRED 100 list of digital powerbrokers nominate individuals they feel will make a huge impact on people's lives, through digital projects.

Taavet Hinrikus made his name co-founding TransferWise - a platform to transfer money abroad cheaply. For his nomination, Hinrikus is focused on digital worlds, rather than the financial world.

Herman Narula is CEO of Improbable, a platform that enables developers to build huge, complex simulations using thousands of machines in the cloud. Using such distributed systems - much like in high frequency trading - could enable the digital worlds of computer games to be responsive to players on a scale never previously possible.

If one player destroyed a building in a first-person shooter, for example, every player would experience the altered landscape, and the change could remain indefinitely - the system could "remember" the new normal, rather than rendering the original design five minutes later. But the tech isn't limited to gaming.

"[Narula is] trying to create a system where you can simulate large-scale problems in the world and applying modern, computational technologies to it to see what the possible outcomes could be," says Hinrikus. Improbable can simulate complicated scenarios - everything from fluid mechanics, to flows on people in a city.

"Take for example, the possible impact of shutting down a tube station on a city," says Narula. "Without a simulation we can guess at what that might be. But with a simulation we can actually run that experiment: How does it impact where people can get to? How does it impact commercial activity? What is the actual cost of it?"