General relativity is unquestionably Einstein's masterpiece, a theory which reveals the workings of the universe at the grandest scales, capturing in one beautiful line of algebra everything from why apples fall from trees to the beginning of time and space.
If you had studied mathematics to the point of being an expert in algebra or calculus, would you revert to counting on your fingers and toes? —Compare 2 Peter 2:20-22.
The main advantage of ACELP is that the algebraic codebook it uses can be made very large (> 50 bits) without running into storage (RAM/ROM) or complexity (CPU time) problems.
The programs that were developed during this time were, to most people, simply "astonishing": computers were solving algebra word problems, proving theorems in geometry and learning to speak English.