Accomplishing the Impossible The movie Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, opens with the Kobayashi Maru test being administered to an aspiring starship captain. This test is a simulation of an attack on the student's ship, to test the student's responses to the various calamities resulting from the attack. As each difficulty is dealt with, the simulation computer issues a new, even more difficult, problem until it is no longer humanly possible to handle the situation. It was impossible to win the simulation game. And yet one person, James Kirk, had won it. It was impossible, but he did it. How? He hacked into the simulation computer the night before the test and reprogrammed it. He cheated, but he won. Anything that seems to be impossible is only impossible within the conditions, rules, laws, hypotheses, assumptions, that limit the means that may be taken to accomplish the desired effect. This set of conditions define the paradigm, or “box”, that restricts the mental act...
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