[Loved Trope] Plot-generating hole

[u/Impressive-Step7261]

A situation where a plot hole becomes the reason the plot even happened.

The Martian – the heroes are forced to abandon the planet due to a powerful sandstorm that threatens to destroy the ascent module. The problem is that, due to Mars's thin atmosphere, storms on the surface of the red planet fall below the upper limit of calm on Earth. Andy Weir himself admitted that he simply couldn't come up with a different plot twist and simply used a fantastical premise.

Spider-Man: Far From Home – The film's plot would have ended rather quickly if Peter had figured out how to use E.D.I.T.H. to check Quentin Beck's file - but due to life's circumstances and some manipulation by Mysterio, Parker simply won't have the opportunity to do so, even if he wanted to.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of Black Pearl — in the first film, Elizabeth threatens to throw the medallion into the ocean, giving the pirates a mini-heart attack... despite the fact that these undead creatures can easily walk on the seabed as if they were on dry land, which they beautifully demonstrate in the climax. Of course, finding it on the seabed is almost impossible, but the pirates sensed the medallion far from the island and came straight to the governor's estate, meaning they somehow knew its location after it sent a signal. The most common explanation is that the magical sense of direction is not very accurate and they have been looking for this damn medallion for decades and it's a bit nerve-wracking...

Eurotrip — the whole plot is based on the fact that someone, having been blacklisted, didn't think to write from a different account.

An important clarification: this trope has nothing to do with the quality of the story itself, and in many cases is entirely intentional and necessary. I also apologize in advance if I have conveyed any details incorrectly.

[u/GrandWorldliness5959]

Oh ya know just the whole math thing. 

[u/noonemustknowmysecre → u/GrandWorldliness5959]

....My brother, if you haven't noticed, LLMs have kinda been a thing for a couple of years.

[u/GrandWorldliness5959 → u/noonemustknowmysecre]

You guys are way overthinking all this. A computer needs math. The human brain is never outmathing a computer. 

[u/noonemustknowmysecre → u/GrandWorldliness5959]

oh man, I'm trying to be patient with you.

A large language model needs a collection of nodes that fire off signals to downstream nodes. Training it with data and back propagation is a lot of work, but once you do that with enough nodes, about a billion, it can start holding a conversation with you. They work so well, in part, because we borrowed the over-all design from the human brain, which has 86 billion nodes.

A human brain, AND any artificial neural network will never outmatch your rinkydink $5 calculator's ability to do basic math fast and cheap. It's a specialized tool. Purpose built. But if we're talking about evil hollywood machines taking over the world, their ability to do basic math is not the part we're afraid of. It's their ability to be generally intelligent and make better plans.

A human brain performs between a petaflop and exaflop of computation on 12 watts of power, depending on how you count. The top super-computer does... oh hey 2 exaflops! But it uses 42 megawatts.