I'm glad you're thinking about it, because I've had no-one else to talk to about it! Mostly.
The more I think about it, the more I think that Spock's program wasn't a program in the way we're thinking of. The simulator itself probably runs on a huge quasi-AI program -- Spock's programming was largely a case of working out every possible move in a game of chess, and making sure the AI always knew the best counter-move for anything the cadets did. Those reactions were probably all stored in something more like a database, than a program.
That would eliminate the need to reverse-engineer anything -- Kirk probably already slept with someone who knows how the core of the simulator works. :-P It would also greatly reduce the need to cover his tracks -- in a database, once you've cracked all the security, you can make a change without it updating any "last altered on" date. It would leave two challenges -- getting past security, and making an effective change in the least noticeable way possible.
Like you said, he probably had security hacked the first week he was there. Every layer of it, even though there were three dummy layers meant to leave the sneakier cadets thinking they'd hacked it.
I've been thinking he took a sledgehammer to the test, but now I realize he didn't. He didn't put in some huge glaring "shut off the enemy's shields at X time" -- because they didn't just drop their shields, they stopped responding completely. He put in some small, sneaky little "when the captain starts crunching an apple, that's a sign that the ship has been destroyed." Because they didn't just drop their shields, they stopped. Game (test) over. Federation ship destroyed, and all the little AI ships come to a stop and drop their shields. And don't do anything annoying, like react to being blown away one shot at a time.
He knew how they would react to game over, because he'd already lost the test.
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The more I think about it, the more I think that Spock's program wasn't a program in the way we're thinking of. The simulator itself probably runs on a huge quasi-AI program -- Spock's programming was largely a case of working out every possible move in a game of chess, and making sure the AI always knew the best counter-move for anything the cadets did. Those reactions were probably all stored in something more like a database, than a program.
That would eliminate the need to reverse-engineer anything -- Kirk probably already slept with someone who knows how the core of the simulator works. :-P It would also greatly reduce the need to cover his tracks -- in a database, once you've cracked all the security, you can make a change without it updating any "last altered on" date. It would leave two challenges -- getting past security, and making an effective change in the least noticeable way possible.
Like you said, he probably had security hacked the first week he was there. Every layer of it, even though there were three dummy layers meant to leave the sneakier cadets thinking they'd hacked it.
I've been thinking he took a sledgehammer to the test, but now I realize he didn't. He didn't put in some huge glaring "shut off the enemy's shields at X time" -- because they didn't just drop their shields, they stopped responding completely. He put in some small, sneaky little "when the captain starts crunching an apple, that's a sign that the ship has been destroyed." Because they didn't just drop their shields, they stopped. Game (test) over. Federation ship destroyed, and all the little AI ships come to a stop and drop their shields. And don't do anything annoying, like react to being blown away one shot at a time.
He knew how they would react to game over, because he'd already lost the test.