History Main / UnwinnableTrainingSimulation

* In ''Film/Passenger57'', John Cutter's EstablishingCharacterMoment is forcing a stewardess undergoing hostage negotiation training to endure one of these, with him playing a hostile and irrational hostage taker who [[ShootTheHostage "kills" his "hostage"]] out of sheer spite. This gets him chewed out by his superiors for driving the trainees too hard, but it also provides foreshadowing to the fact the BigBad and his goons all share this mentality, and [[spoiler:it is eventually revealed that Cutter lost his wife in a similar situation with a pissed-off robber, and thus his attitude in the simulation was him taking out his grief on others]].

* ''ComicBook/TheIncredibleHercules'': Subverted when Hercules, disguised as Thor, is challenged to complete a game of chess by the dark elves. Declaring the scenario unwinnable, he triumphantly announces he is "changing the rules" and [[FlippingTheTable flips the table]]. The dark elf queen cheers him on, while one of her advisors futilely tries to inform her that the scenario was entirely winnable.

** The "Kobayashi Maru" training scenario, first seen in ''Film/StarTrekIITheWrathOfKhan'', is a seminal example, referenced in other sci-fi works and still serving as a redirect name for the trope on this very wiki. It's a test of how a cadet responds to a [[HeadsIWinTailsYouLose hopeless situation]]. The ''Kobayashi Maru'' in this scenario is a freighter which has struck a {{Space Mine|s}} and drifted into TheNeutralZone between [[ProudWarriorRace Klingon]] and [[TheFederation Federation]] territories. The cadet receives the ship's distress call and is obliged to respond by Starfleet mandate, so ignoring it [[ButThouMust is not an option]] -- but visiting the Neutral Zone runs the risk of inspiring the Klingons' ire. The result is an inevitable BolivianArmyEnding: multiple Klingon ships show up and blow the cadet's ship to smithereens in under a minute, and TheComputerIsACheatingBastard with the RandomNumberGod on its side, inflating the opponents' numbers, weaponry, accuracy, and belligerence far beyond what is politically consistent, realistic, or even physically possible. The cadet is supposed to lose; the test, as indicated by the page quote, is a SecretTestOfCharacter. But, during the film, we discover that Kirk ''did'' beat it -- by hacking the simulation in advance and reprogramming it so that he could win. Strictly speaking, this was cheating, but his instructors at least appreciated his lateral thinking and [[{{Determinator}} refusal to give up]]. And Kirk apparently took the test several times before he resorted to his unique solution; he simply refused to accept the concept of a no-win scenario. In a sense, he failed there too, as Kirk is thrown into a ''real'' unwinnable scenario at the film's climax, which could only be solved by his best friend's HeroicSacrifice.

* After second selection, ''Manga/BlueLock'' pits teams of five selected players versus five of the best professional players. Who are paid on results. [[HopeSpot Blue Lock players score the first goal]], but at this point World Five only admit they have to play a little seriously… cue CurbStompBattle.

* ''Fanfic/CheatCodeSupportStrategist'': For Izuku's practical Support entrance exam, Nedzu has Izuku hack UA's servers. Izuku is devastated when he's unable to succeed, but then feels better when Mei points out that since the school's cybersecurity is top-notch and impossible to be hacked by any random hacker, it's very likely that Nedzu's test was to see how Izuku dealt with problems he couldn't solve. Izuku's acceptance letter in the following chapter confirms this, with Powerloader admitting that if Izuku was successful, he would be extremely worried about the quality of UA’s cybersecurity.

* A fairly common practice after a particularly notable air disaster involving some kind of failure of the aircraft is to program a simulator with the scenario, put experienced pilots in the cockpit, and see if there was anything at all that could have been done. Even if the test pilots know what's coming, it's not unusual for it to be demonstrated to be utterly impossible to have saved the aircraft. In cases of ''near'' disaster, running the simulation often shows how ridiculously lucky and/or skilled the original pilots were to have pulled off what they did. A concrete example of this was the "Gimli Glider" incident in 1983 [[note]]Air Canada had recently switched from Imperial to Metric measures, and the fuel filling was done with the wrong units, causing Air Canada Flight 143 to unexpectedly run out of fuel mid-flight. The pilot, an experienced glider pilot, was able to glide the 747 to a near-perfect landing, with [[EverybodyLives no deaths on the plane or the ground[[/note]]. After the incident, numerous simulation runs were made to replicate what the pilot had done to resolve the situation, and in each case the simulator plane crashed catastrophically.

** The most famous is the "Vimes Run", where the students are convinced to take a run at Sir Samuel Vimes, who's all to happy to give them a reality check.

** Another tale has Wizard Ponder Stibbons, a man not inclined to sadism or cold-blooded violence, prevailed upon by his middle daughter, a student Assassin, to help with her homework. The homework exercise is a thought-experiment: in which Famke and her friends are given a scenario where they have to plot the inhumation of a Wizard in his tower. Ponder, in order to teach her a valuable life-lesson, proposes to the three girls that they target him and he will role-play the client, acording to the exercise scenario. Famke and her classmates then learn, in a non-lethal and relatively safe way, why Assassins do not go up against magic users on their own turf. Which was of course the whole point of their being given an unwinnable scenario.

* Some ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' fanfics use a headcanon that Twilight's "hatch the dragon egg" test to enter the School for Gifted Unicorns was one of these. The egg is supposed to be impossible to hatch; the exam doesn't judge a student's magical power, but what solutions they try and what their reaction is to their inevitable failure. In this scenario, Twilight actually hatching the egg was a magical feat of BeyondTheImpossible that qualified her to become Celestia's personal student.

* Zig-zagged during the US military's Millennium Challenge 2002 war game. The goal was to demonstrate and test new military technologies in a simulated Persian gulf war situation, especially relevant given the year. The official factions were merely Red and Blue, with Blue being the USA and Red being either Iraq or Iran. Red Team was commanded by Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, and was expected to lose for a multitude of reasons, including tech and manpower. Van Riper, wanting to instead win and prove a point he believed, used questionable methods and [[https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/4qfoiw/millennium_challenge_2002_setting_the_record/ exploitation of the war game software]] to cause mass casualties to Blue. While Van Riper claimed that this proved that the war games were rigged, the intent of the challenge was to test capability in an accurate situation and provide two weeks' worth of training and data that a loss on day one would completely waste. Van Riper's "tactics" did not actually match Iran's capabilities of the time (such as equipping small speedboats with missiles they were physically incapable of carrying), making all of his data garbage.

%% * The virtual reality wargaming scenes in ''Film/{{Avalon}}''.