film
The 2009 film dramatizes Kirk’s third Kobayashi Maru attempt and the disciplinary hearing that follows. Kirk views his solution as original thinking; Spock views it as cheating that defeats the purpose of the evaluation.
“The purpose is to experience fear.”
AI parallel: Like reward hacking, Kirk maximizes the score while bypassing the evaluator's intended objective.
Dispatches
The Kobayashi Maru was never really about the simulation—it was about the captain. Recent AI incidents raise a similar question: are we evaluating the models, or are they evaluating the governance systems we've built around them?