Whether it makes sense in general doing a calculation now or just waiting isn’t always so clear cut. Also, at least historically there hasn’t always been a choice. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, mathematicians studying the Riemann zeta function really wanted to do hard computations to look at more of the non-trivial zeros. but this was given very low priority by the people who controlled computers and by the people who programmed them. The priority was so low that by the time it advanced up the queue the computer in question would already be labeled as obsolete and thus would not be maintained. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the first such calculation was actually performed
Whether it makes sense in general doing a calculation now or just waiting isn’t always so clear cut. Also, at least historically there hasn’t always been a choice. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, mathematicians studying the Riemann zeta function really wanted to do hard computations to look at more of the non-trivial zeros. but this was given very low priority by the people who controlled computers and by the people who programmed them. The priority was so low that by the time it advanced up the queue the computer in question would already be labeled as obsolete and thus would not be maintained. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the first such calculation was actually performed