Obvious Question

[Renegade Rob]

Was rewatching White Hole recently and was thinking…. not sure if this has been already addressed to death in these forums (or in the Better Than Life novel which I haven’t read for decades now), but it’s pretty clear that the 12,000+ I.Q. Holly anticipated Lister hijacking her “planet pool” plan and worked that into what she gave the Dwarfers, right? As in, Lister taking point and manually throwing out her given plans and doing his own thing, was actually her plan all along?

Topic

[Warbodog]

Good headcanon, but I just think it’s going for the most advanced computer can’t beat human intuition or dumb luck (the latter being a canonical virus Lister might have temporarily picked up, only after all the exercise bike and bean-farts ordeal obviously).

I’ve also wondered if Holly’s calculations would have been totally fine after all and Lister just took a more convoluted approach.

[Flap Jack]

I don’t think so honestly. A 12,000 IQ is impossibly high but it’s not meant to make Holly a god who knows everything. If it were, she wouldn’t need to talk to a toaster to realise her 2 minute lifespan problem, and she wouldn’t need Rimmer to slow down to get what he was saying about the white hole. Presumably she wouldn’t need to hear it from Rimmer at all, she would just detect what was happening picoseconds after being switched on.

If Holly was able to predict that “Lister eyeballing the shot” would be the perfect solution, and she knew that intentionally making her directions wrong would be enough for Lister to pick up on it and overrule her, and she knew that he wouldn’t be outvoted… then why not use that same intelligence to just get the directions correct?

[International Debris]

I don’t think so honestly. A 12,000 IQ is impossibly high but it’s not meant to make Holly a god who knows everything. 

[Flap Jack]

Pssh, the meaning of the universe is just one thing. Super-Holly is all talk.

But I’m mainly making a distinction between her knowing everything there currently is to know, and her being able to perfectly predict the future. She’s not meant to be Cassandra.

[Ben Saunders]

Everybody I’ve met who’s boasted about their high IQ has managed to be deeply, deeply stupid in various other ways. Given that IQ is a bullshit metric to begin with, I wonder what exactly it means for a computer to have “12,000 IQ”, and what the parameters of that would actually be.

[Dave]

I wonder what exactly it means for a computer to have “12,000 IQ”, and what the parameters of that would actually be.

[Nick R]

Everybody I’ve met who’s boasted about their high IQ has managed to be deeply, deeply stupid in various other ways. Given that IQ is a bullshit metric to begin with, I wonder what exactly it means for a computer to have “12,000 IQ”, and what the parameters of that would actually be.

The IQ system featured in Red Dwarf might not be the same as the real life one. But we do know that it can be used for comparisons between computers (Holly, Gordon) and humans (parking attendants, P.E. teachers, Holoship crew members).

[pi r squared]

Assuming that IQ remains normalised around 100 points in the future, an IQ of 12,000 means that there must also be something walking around (or not) with an IQ of -11,800, which seems improbable. Almost as improbable, of course, as the very short remaining runtime being discovered, discussed, and acted upon all within that same very short remaining runtime…

The equally obvious question is, when the fuck are they going to hold Kryten to account for his major fuck ups? He’s reduced Holly’s runtime to just a few minutes here; he can barely operate the matter transporter correctly; he doesn’t install the device Legion gives him correctly and nearly gets everyone sucked into deep space; he bangs on about the importance of never meeting your future selves, conveniently forgetting that only last week he fucked up the teleporter so badly he managed to somehow transport them through time; and blew up the ship because he carelessly tries to reverse the triplicator. Surely you’d have powered him down by now or certainly be very selective about what you let him touch?!

[Dave]

[Ben Saunders]

But we do know that it can be used for comparisons between computers (Holly, Gordon) and humans (parking attendants, P.E. teachers, Holoship crew members).

and glasses of water.

[Technopeasant]

She’s not meant to be Cassandra.

Now there’s a headcanon.

The equally obvious question is, when the fuck are they going to hold Kryten to account for his major fuck ups?

As Pree’s repairs as Rimmer show, they probably wouldn’t do any better. It really annoys me that Kryten forgets he has dabbled in medical science when he meets Butler, having even mastered complex surgery.

[Author]

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