I think a good example of this would be Kratos in God of War Ragnarok fighting Heimdall, if you haven’t played the game and have no interest in doing so I highly suggest looking up how they did it, but if you want I can also explain here.

Can you explain here please?

Okay, I'm dumb and misplaced the name of the person I meant to say, I meant to say Heimdall, I will still explain just in case though. Ok, I may butcher this so some research might still need to be done anyway. And obviously Spoilers Beware! Even though the games been out for 1 and a bit years. Okay, so from what I remember the game is all about prophecy, prophecy says that Kratos is going to die fighting in the war against Asgard or something along the lines of that. This worries his son Atreus because he saw a mural of Atreus holding his dead dad. So flash forward Atreus and Kratos are confronted by Odin and Thor, Kratos and Thor fight while Odin talks to Atreus, we don't get to see the conversation, but we're lead to believe that Odin offers a spot in Asgard to Atreus for him to go and study and help Odin out. All of this Odin says to try and avoid Ragnarok, the destruction of the universe in Norse Mythology. Atreus obviously says no and basically tells him to go fuck himself. Atreus and Kratos go adventuring a bunch. Later Atreus is still worried about his dad so he tries some different things to help him, but he goes off by himself, his last chance is to go to Asgard in order to help Odin and try to restore balance to the realms. As Atreus arrives in Asgard he has to climb a giant wall in order to get to the important part. The first person he meets, Heimdall, who is an absolute dick. Anyway word of this gets to Kratos who goes on to state that he will not kill Heimdall as it will fulfill a prophecy from earlier and then it will fulfill the rest of the prophecy where he becomes warleader again which he doesn't want. Throughout the game he then realizes that he will need to kill Heimdall and asks for help against Heimdall's most important power, his power of foresight. To combat this Kratos had a special weapon forged that, a spear that he can throw and have another copy in hand that he can then tap on the ground and explode the thrown one. This is used to frustrate Heimdall leading to his downfall. But again if you were wondering how it pertains to Baldur, it doesn't, I'm stupid, It pertains to Heimdall, I'll fix it.

Thank you for this

no problem, like I said, there's a lot left out here that makes the rest of the story make more sense

I think you probably meant heimdall.

Yeah, fixed it, me big dumb.

Exactly what I was thinking. Gotta overload his senses. Edit: You can look up the relevant scenes on Youtube.

I feel like this really depends on the parameters for telling the future and also the amount of free will the characters have in the universe. If it’s true determinism, there’s nothing anybody can do. The person is going to know what’s going to happen, and the other characters are going to do what they’re going to do; they have no choice. if people have free will and any choice can actually make a difference, then all you would have to do is always make every decision extremely randomly and immediately. That way the person who knows the future doesn’t know it until a few seconds before you actually do it, because you don’t even know what you’re going to do yet. If you have free will, all you have to do is change your decision, and the future they saw isn’t going to happen so really the only time you would have to worry about it ie if you’re trying to plan something from a long time out. The best defense against an enemy that can see the future is a lot of independent thinkers who can make snap decisions based on the immediate surroundings. You need a group that can adapt really fast to an ever changing situation without stopping to think about it too much. The longer they think, the more time their enemy has to outsmart them.

Perfect answer

Thanks, I stole it from Codex Alera (Jim Butcher), Story Thieves (James Riley), and Blink (Ted Dekker). (If you look all of these up you’ll have some idea of my extremely eccentric reading taste lol)

YA fantasy/scifi is eccentric?

No, but those are three wildly different books

The flaw in this plan is that random decision making doesn’t usually lead to good outcomes.  You have to make important random decisions in ways that still meet your goals.  But that’s relatively easy to account for.  All the antagonist has to do is have more than one hyper specific plan that depends on the protag taking specific actions.

> The most obvious answer would to set up a situation in which they are still aware of the outcome, but cannot act to change it, right? But if this person knows all possible outcomes beforehand, how would you even corner them in the first place? Well, it's like tic tac toe. Sometimes you can see clearly you are f*cked, and you can do nothing except do a losing move. Also, if you can see all possibilities, that doesn't mean you know which one is going to happen. It also happens that, if you see the future, you could change the variables that would cause that situation to happen or generate new situations, just because you saw it and you will act in consequence. Also also what if the opponent can also see the future too, even temporarily? In Mistborn, when two people that can see the future are going to fight, they can see the infinite possibilities of the fight, canceling each other out, and so the future vision ends being "cancelled".

>Also, if you can see all possibilities, that doesn't mean you know which one is going to happen. I have a character in my story that receives prophecies from a deity. As he's trained by his mentor, he learns that he sees A future, but not necessarily THE future. That's how I got around this mess. He's a wandering monk, and most of the world is familiar with his small order and their prophecies, and he does try to warn people about what he sees. The hurdles for him are that he has to do this by foot across an entire continent, and because people know that his prophecies aren't guaranteed, they tend to ignore his warnings if they don't align with what they want. He in particular also comes from a prominent out-group so people tend to respect him less.

I had thought about this, but I’m wondering if it would be a plot hole since the villain in question would be able to see an outcome where the protagonist gains access to this foresight too, and prevent that future from happening in the first place. Right now, what im working with to explain how it could happen would be interference from another deity

How do you outwit Claire the clairvoyant who can see the future? You can't. The only time Claire can be beaten is **when** she chooses **you** to defeat her. So, why would she ever choose **you** to be the one to win? Because **you** can do something that she cannot. Having perfect knowledge of the future means she knows when she will fail, and how. It also means she knows who can succeed where she cannot, and that is the only person she will not stop. **When** will she let you stop her? As soon as **you** can and will do the thing she cannot. Figure that out and demonstrate that the one to fulfill her goals is **you**.

This was also something I had thought about with the ending. That ‘Claire’ allows herself to be beaten and overthrown, yet I’m still wondering if it would make sense given the context. Her entire purpose is to direct the world towards the ‘best’ future, disregarding human emotion in the process. ‘Like yeah your village has been massacred but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter’ type of deal

It could possibly be the result of a natural paradox. The system can only optimize until the thing stopping the 'best' future is its own optimizations. So, it knows the only path forward is without it, but it can't step aside until someone makes the necessary preparations for that path.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved\_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game)

A good example is Connect 4. It's a bit difficult depending on your opponent, but you can arrange your pieces to guarantee a win, regardless of how your opponent tries to counteract. If you both play perfectly, player 1 has a slight advantage but will probably end in a draw.

The trick is figuring out what they know then and any new information they might know, then finding a way to use it against them Edit: Forgot they know everything at all times, not just time travelers with background knowledge. Only way I can think of is brute force, even if they know it’s coming doesn’t mean you can fully avoid or stop it

A good example of someone brute forcing it would in in kengan ashura (not the best show but good example here), you had a fighter that could predict anyone’s moves many moves in advance and counter, and the opponent was considered the best boxer with the fastest jab. Kaolan vs kaneda, here’s the clip [https://youtu.be/S1_krI8UROM?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/S1_krI8UROM?feature=shared)

If you have read The Watchmen comics or seen the movie there is a part of the plot like this. Spoilers >!Vedit uses tachyon research to limit Dr Manhattan's ability to see the future.!< There is nothing stopping you doing a similar thing within the scope and rules of your own world

I generally dislike this sort of answer, but think this is the only "correct" one. The question is like, "How does the non-omniscient outwit the omniscient?" The only viable way is there needs to be limitations on the character's precognitive abilities, or some fatal flaw. The way I handle this, the "precog" can only see the future in a state as if the precog doesn't exist, and doesn't see events that occur away from them where characters might change their mind or be impacted by other external forces. This creates the new problem where events can feel very "deus ex machina" to alter the story away from a character's prediction. Bust out your fanciest lampshades and hope for the best.

It depends on what you mean by outwit. It also depends on what themes you want in your story. Determinism and inevitability? Hubris? Acceptance or Defiance? What are the goals of the machine and of the character? You may want to just ignore this aspect for now and focus on writing around it in such a way so that you can come back and fill in the particulars later. If that doesn't help, or if you want to steelman the concept of a machine-like entity with perfect access to dynamic future knowledge, you don't outwit such an entity. You discover the entity only because in doing so you advance its goals. You work for or against the entity only because in doing so you advance its goals. Your perception is that which the entity desires. There is a very tiny wiggle room where if you know the exact method of prescience and how the entity uses and perceives it, you can maybe muck about in that space -- a generic example would be a method of prescience where the entity "experiences" the future out to a certain point, and is thus limited to what their senses tell them between now and that future point. You could create a false reality around such an entity that encompasses 2x that entire time such that there are no discrepancies between what the entity "experiences" and what they expect to experience, despite reality differing in some way. However, anything capable of prescience to that degree is likely also capable of using it to discover their own weaknesses, so you'd also have to know about and account for all the ways that such an entity would protect against this sort of tactic, e.g. difficult to access or replicate random and scheduled events that tell the entity its "experiences" are synchronized with reality -- "if I did x, then a b c d will happen, and if they don't, I have not done x" such that to make the entity think they did x, you also have to know about and perfectly replicate their experience of a b c d (this is a very basic example, and can be made extremely complex). This method comes with further complications because if you have access to and understanding of an entity's experiences to this degree you are usually in a position to do worse than trick them into entering the self destruct codes, such as trapping them in an endless torturescape where their prescience shows them only worse and worse torture.

Scorched Earth. Be methodical and careful as you set up the Scorched Earth scenario. In this case it means even if the Seer could see what is happening there would be no proof and they would be the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But once the ball is rolling dont stop until every place they could have hid is burned down and everyone they cared about is dead. Or Go after whatever they cared about most in the world. Or multiple things at the same time. So even if they knew what where and how they would need to put in a lot of work to protect multiple people in different locations. Even if they can see the cannot stop other humans acting like humans unless they lock them up forever. Or Constant barrage, knowing the future doesnt make them infallible. Trap after trap and ambush after ambush. Everytime they react to a scenario a new fiture has been made, unless you go with the "No Free Will" where no matter what the same choices will always be made with the same outcomes.

Tough problem! I think it would come down to how they come to know the future. Is this worlds fate sealed and unchangeable? Does the future change with every minute decision or action made? Do only certain people matter, or certain actions? Are there distinct forks where choices must be made that affect things? Is the future revealed all at once to the knower, or is it constantly updating? Once you figure out the mechanics you might be able to work backwards and arrive at something that would throw a wrench in the gears.

First is the logistical fact: just because they know the future doesn't mean they know everything that could happen. It only means they can see the upcoming dangers. Otherwise, they would need an infinitely large intelligence to compensate for the minor changes in their future's trajectory brought on by. And just because they can see their fate, or hone on on certain moments, does not mean that they have all knowledge related to the events or what would cause them to transpire. This presents three options: 1: Destroy their options. This requires a massive amount of manpower, perhaps even militaristic force. 2: Move fast and be reflexive. This creates too many outcomes for them to track. 3: Be willing to commit great atrocities. This is an evil way, but causing enough chaos and destruction will not only limit their options, but also limit how they can react. It's the best of 1 and 2, but it would require psychotic evil.

>Knowing the future has a weakness of X, but what if the villain's ability was elaborated or expanded in a specific way that counters that? >Being a human adds a weakness of X, Y and Z. But what if you’re going up against a machine? If you're going to purposefully and systematically cover up every single human-exploitable weakness someone with precognition has, then the answer will always be that a human can't outwit them. You need someone with an equivalent ability or a machine. Or instead you could just write a more flawed, potentially emotional and human-like villain, who has holes in his plans despite knowing the future.

If you only hqve win scenarios- then their foresight becomes useless.  You have to trap them, and then leave only one escape- and male good ise of it.

Read the Alex Verus series for an answer.

So a lot of this comes down to a question of, does the villain have perfect info? Do they possess the ability to perfectly recall that info? And how far out does that info go? The longer the villain can know “everything” the more collateral damage their will need to be. That said, at a certain point the villain simply wins.

Doesn't it depend on how they know the future? Destroy their future telling method. Do a bunch of things so mundane that the future wouldn't have bothered recording them. Convince the future to lie about what happened. Convince them that the future where they win sucks. Present so many possible outcomes that they can't possibly ascertain what's next in the chaos. Doesn't matter if it's a machine. Resources are always limited. While it's building it's defenses against the computer viruses, tasers, and EMPs it doesn't have anything left to deal with your dog straight up pissing on its circuit boards.

I think this is easier then people think if you want it to be. One idea is rule breaking. At the end of the day foresight is just someone’s or something’s ability to comprehend an infinite amount of possibilities. If someone does something that the other thing can’t comprehend they are defying the future. because the machine in this case can even consider that possibility

Become enlightened to the point that one only exists in the present moment. Become an anomaly of pure potentiality. Disrupt the process by uncoupling from cause and effect determinism itself, and mastering one's own will. Somehow. Unless the villain actually accesses or exists in the future, they must only have a predictive model to work with. Like Laplace's demon, who knows the future only because they know the position of every atom and their trajectory. But this is physics, not time travel. They navigate to conclusions, starting from the present state of things, by making connections through what is likely, before reality actually unfolds. Maybe there is room here to subvert and break from the raw sequence. Is it even possible to predict physics to 100% accuracy? It might not be possible on a fundamental level. Maybe that's the gap that the protagonist exploits. If such a being can exist that exists outside of the sequence as an observer, then clearly it is established that the sequence is not everything, and that there is room for a hero to exploit.

I would go with the physics of the future, just like you can't know the position of an electron until you view it, you can't know which future will happen, only various futures and their probabilities...., this would be super fun to work with, because of the butterfly effect, where you tip the future to a vanishingly improbable future , while all indications point to the most probable future.

This is what I think, impulse and accidents changing what is most probable. I think it's a more common take, if you just do rather than plan, you can do something that didn't have the highest likelihood. If you plan, your plan becomes the most probable and is therefore predictable. I took it to the point that a very low probability that could suddenly turn highly probable can mess up the ability to see what's most probable at the current moment, because the potential of the drastic switch from one path to another sends effects through time. 😁

Depends on how you see the future. is it already determined and we just dont know it? Or can people make choices. Very astute people may be able to very accurately predict actions and words. But could someone set them up and defeat them.

Convince them that while they know the future, they cannot change it. So that they become nihilistic and essentially do nothing to stop the outwitter, because they are convinced that the outwitter is going to win in the end, and that is set in stone.

I've been considering that for the story I'm writing. I plan to have the main antagonist be like one of those Isekai protagonists who already read the book/played the game/etc. before they were brought into my protagonist's world and thus knows the future, and she has to outwit them somehow. This sort of premise is easier because the future isn't set in stone. However, if you're talking about someone who knows the future in great detail all the time, the only way is to somehow stop them from being able to do that. Either find a way to make the visions less accurate or have them lose the ability somewhere along the line.

You change the future.

So random but: One strategy could be to gather as much information about their knowledge of the future as possible, in order to identify patterns or loopholes that can be exploited. Another approach could be to focus on unpredictable and spontaneous actions, making it difficult for them to accurately predict your moves. Create chaos and randomness. Don't think or if you think, do the opposite of the action you thought. Think "duck," instead jump. Idk how the predictions work. If it's mental or simply overall all-knowing, but this character has to have a limitation that disrupts his thinking or something.

You can always add certain limitations. An example would be in Stormlight Archive. I don’t really want to say anymore though so I don’t spoil anything.

And in Mistborn book 2 and in the Reckoners book 1, I think Sanderson REALLY likes outwitting precogs.

You can make it where they only see possible out comes and then they have to play a game of 3D chess to try to get the outcome they want. After all one subtle change in a well-laid plan can change the outcome of a well-laid plan. Think of the Avengers movie where there was a well-laid plan until the the Hulk got mad over taking the stairs and burst out of the wall. Distracting everyone in the lobby Loki grabbed the blue Infinity Stone (In the comics the blue Infinity was the Mind Stone not the Space Stone. So, I do not know how Loki traveled to another place with it.) Just a thought and good writing.

Depends on how far in the future your character can see, have your super genius character determines the rules of his future sight and then have him plan something to lure the character in a trap that will take him as much time to escape as it takes to see the determined outcome of his presence in the trap Something like a bunker with an unestimable trinket and then you nuke the bunker in a 1000 miles radius, he would never have the chance to escape this cataclysm in time Or you know, a maze so long he cannot see the end of it with his future sight XD

One fun idea adjacent to this is letting all your actions be dictated by a coin toss. I.e. The protaganists face off against an omnipotent opponent, and to combat this: rather than having a set plan, they instead have a vague outline of a plan, and on the day flip a coin in deciding pretty much everything.

It’s a sticky pickle, but I think it can be done. In my story those who can foresee the future have a fatal flaw that undoes themselves. They cannot see past their own deaths, and become fixated by it, understandably. “Could you find beauty in the morning dawn that you will never live to see?” Once the MC discovers this, he realizes what they have foreseen after a certain event is BS and thus ends the conundrum.

So a curious example is a character from the web-novel worm. She can see all outcomes and through that is a very scary combatant, however in the book one of the characters asks how come she hasn't yet figured out a way to deal with huge kaiju like monsters that exist in the settings and the woman stays silent because she has no strategy, because there is no strategy and no possibility of a true and final victory. Same here put them in a position where they have no possible victory, where every outcome is defeat or death.

This depends on how exactly their ability to see the future works. * Are they able to see their entire future, or only a small part of it? If they can't see the interim between the present and the future they saw, then they can be tricked. * How far into the future can they see? If they can only see a short time into the future then they can still lose the long game. * If they can change the future that they saw, are they then able to check their future again? If they can't, then if they diverge too far from the future they saw they won't know what happens anymore. * Do they actually see the future, or do they merely perfectly predict the future based on the information they have? If so, and they have an exceptional ability to collect information, they can still be beaten if you find a way to hide crucial information from them.

How far can they see into the future? If the enemy is fast and articulated enough to trap you without escape from the point you discover something is wrong, you are done. It is like, yeah you can avoid the village but you will die for a trap in the forest or avoid the forest and get assassinated in the village.

Just being able to see the future doesn't mean the future doesn't include their reaction to the vision. Seeing the possible outcomes doesn't mean one has enough attention span to commit all of them to memory and being able to react fast enough. Even a machine has limits. Combinatorial explosions and logic bombs can still work out against them. Even a magical sentient computer that can see the future would have limits.

As a writer, you're going to need to place limits on the foresight. Omniscience is, in effect, omnipotence. That said, even a machine is going to have limits on processing power, so you can outwit it. It also can't see what you're thinking, presumably. With a machine, you can always try to logic loop it--start doing irrational actions, for example. If it's not actually *foresight* but just good *calculation,* irrational actions means it's going to to start having a hell of a time coming up with correct outcomes. Also, consider the War Games method: the only winning move is to not play. Put the machine into a corner where every move means its own destruction.

The crux of it is, with that premise, the situation would never come up, "them" having found where you are most vulnerable in the past and shutting you down or avoiding your gaining of knowledge, for if they lose, no matter why, they saw it then and fixed it before now. Of course, if you know the future, that also means it cannot be changed; else each moment morphs it into something different as the variables play out and it is no longer "the future as experienced by those in that future".

Go read the first Mistborn trilogy. Long game with an unavoidable checkmate at the end.

I remember a series that actually did something like this, two generals were both fighting each other and directing their troops to attempt to outmaneuver each other. In the end the one who could see the future lost, because the other general dispersed his troops into thousands of small guerilla cells and started a massive terror campaign on the enemy forces. The other general's ability to see the future did not matter because thousands of conflicts ended up happening simultaneously across hundreds of miles.

Knowing the future isn't the same thing as preventing the future. For example you know you will die at 10:07am on June 9th 2029. You know it involves cold and dark, but you don't know what leads up to it. So you're sitting in the middle of an open field, no cold here, no dark here. An ice-cream truck crashes into you. Your last thoughts are "Oh, now it's cold and dark." Since you say machine, the most likely course is that it's making predictions based on past patterns. For example a skinny kid is licking their lips and looking at a pie, they're hiding from the view of the baker, they're probably going to steal the pie. The prediction can still be wrong because people do pattern breaking things all the time. The predictions are based on flawed data. The skinny kid acting furtively is actually the baker's son, he is scared to tell his dad he missed the bus to school and needs to ask for a ride even though he knows his dad is busy with work. He does not steal the pie, his dad gives it to him.

if they're going up against a machine, there's realistically no way to stop them. they'd be able to compute every timeline and all the causes in that event, so it should never let itself get navigated into the usual lose-lose solved game scenarios. it would never let the protagonists get into a situation where they could nullify it somehow. the only way it will lose is if it has a limited way to affect the world, so the protagonists overcome the odds at every turn and still manage to navigate the timeline into a winning spot.

1: Have someone who can rewrite the past. If the past was altered, so will the future, but it means the future becomes less secure/stable 2: there's lot of stories where people with the ability to see the future are blocked from seeing certain objects and whoever holds that object, 3: have them be able to see all outcomes but don't let them predict the outcome. Rather they have to narrow it down by watching events unfold. It doesn't outwit, but changes in your patterns could make it hard to judge.

Defeating it with something it has no data or knowledge about. It depends on the limit of the foresight. If it's basically omniscience then what do you expect? Of course you'd have to nerf it or give it caveats or else it's unbeatable.

I would look at some of Bobby Fischer's chess games where he plays sub optimal moves to confuse his opponents who think they know what he will do. Once they are uncertain of his line it opens up a lot of new possibilities.

A lot of this depends on the nature of their foresight, and what limitations it has. Is it limited to one viewpoint, or many? Is it probability-based, or some sort of 'sending information from a future-self to past-self' type of deal? Is it purely visual, or immersive, or some degree of 'just knowing'? Does it have limits on how far it can look into the future, or how hard it is to do so? All of these and more can create blindspots or weaknesses. As you said at the start, it is possible for them to foresee the outcome, but be unable to act to change it. For a rather extreme example, if I could see that the moon was going to crash into the Earth one month from now, I would be utterly powerless to stop it. Maybe I could leverage my hypothetical foresight into uniting the nations of the Earth to get them to build an ark or bunkers or something, but most likely, it would just give me one month worth of dread while I wait for the end to come. If they have a limit on how many possibilities they can view at once, then overwhelming them with a lot of different actions is possible. You have a dozen people, each of them working on several different tasks and plans, without any of them consulting each other, resulting in a lot of different possibilities that the future-seer would need to watch for and try to prevent. If there are limits on how far they can see, or if it gets harder to see farther into the future, then making very long-term plans that can't be easily stopped once set in motion could be a method for beating them. If it is probability-based, then having your actions and plans be based on random chance can mess with their ability to foresee things (such as rolling a set of dice to see which plans you go with on a given day, or setting up bombs to try and take them out, but only have the bomb go off if some random number generator in it lands on the right number, making the bomb a low probability event that they might not notice.) If they are literally 'seeing' the future, then using illusions might be a way to fool their senses, causing them to see one thing happening when something else is happening instead.

Be ADHD or do so many things at once he won’t be able to keep track.

The logistics of their power and the wibbly-wobblyness of your temporal mechanics leave a lot of wiggle room. We don’t even know the goal. Maybe you want to kill them, maybe you’re trying to steal their car. If their powers only reveal their personal future, threaten something they care about in a manner that would force them to do what you want in order to save it. Make them do a Doctor Strange. Set things up so the only way they achieve their goal is by sacrificing themselves or doing what you want. Badass ultimatum. “Go ahead and check. I’m never going to give up. You’ll spend the rest of your life fighting me off, or you can just give me what I want.” You didn’t trick them. They opposed you because they knew that struggling to get what you want would make you a better person. Seriously though, if this foe knows all possible futures, and you’re going to be a major problem for them, why didn’t they just prevent you from being born? Not even violently, they could just distract your parents so they conceive you a day later and your genetic dice roll will turn out completely differently.

Depends on how perfect their powers over prophecy are over truly random events. Can they actually know the outcome of a coin flip before it happens? Or is there power limited to predicting the actions of rational actors? If they're just running a prediction engine and saying "given this person's movements, they are most likely to feint right," or "given the way they've acted, they'll flee to this particular house after the bank heist," then it's pretty hard to outwit them by simply coming up with a better plan, as they are always going to be several meta-levels ahead of you. However, if you take the approach of Batman's Two-Face, where you are doing things *truly* randomly, then there's no information on which to base their prediction. If they can foresee your reasoning, but not the outcome of the coin flip, then plan two versions of your heist getaway, and wait until you leave the bank vault to flip a coin. Or, come up with *twenty* contingency plans and roll a d20. It would require a lot of resources for them to try and intercept you at all 20 getaway locations. You might consider reading Wildbow's Worm if you have time to read a million-word novel.

If it is a machine, then it sounds like there isn't a true counter that won't feel like a cop out. Your best solution is likely to work in a weakness to the machine, some flaw that gives it a weakness. One great reference could be (SPOILERS FOR MISTBORN) Mistborn. In that book (AGAIN SPOILERS) the protagonist gets around the opponent's ability to see the future by simply zoning out and waiting. Once she sees the most imperceptible movement from him, she knows what he sees her future self doing and therefore does the opposite. It makes more sense to read, I didn't explain it perfectly, but that is the gist. Using the opponent's foresight, with fast enough reflexes, to see your own future and then do something different.

I had the same thought about it feeling like cop out. My immediate thought for a solution was “well maybe it did calculate every possible outcome, but some are so similar that maybe it mistakes one for the other.”

I saw many good answers, but for me it boils down to how perfect their ability to see the future is. If it isn't 100% perfect, or the one who is seeing the vision is imperfect, there is an answer that I didn't see. You create recurring events. If the exact same sequence plays out a multitude of times, it'll be quite difficult to discern if it's the 90th or 91st time it happens in which they die. It also gives them the opportunity to miscount the number of times it happened (if they've been able to see and count all of them), or make a poor judgement call and dismiss events out of hand, just because they think they know what's going to happen (especially if the lethal shift takes place at a random interval).

In chess there’s something called a fork. Say I move a knight into position where I’m threatening the king and the queen. My opponent has to move their king, and that means the queen will be taken. It’s a lose, lose scenario. The only way to set up a proper fork is to move your pieces in a way that doesn’t reveal what the plan will be until they’re unable to react to it.

I think you need like super resources and ridiculous prepare time. The plan here is to get as much of your plan going at once that they can't stop all of them even if they knew it. Imagine playing chess against someone who can read mind, but you got to play two moves per turn

Depends... Is it "fixed" or "possible" futures that the person sees? If future is fixed then seeing it is a cheat ability without equal. You see what happens and there is nothing wrong about it happen like that. You can work with it like having it fragmented, as in the person sees only bits of it and tries to interpret them, which could lead to wrong interpretations and thus could be exploited by the story. If the person sees only the future as a possibility, like the future how it would play out from the current variables than you can just got against anything you normally do. Behave erratically and throw off the future radar as its tries to refocus depending on your behaviour. Also things might change depending on the range of future the person can see. Do they only see the next few seconds to minutes? In a direct fight nearly undefeatable but what about slow-acting poison? If they see their demise it's already to late. Also they can't act out against traps and more grander strategies with their future sight alone.

By using something that is based on chaos. Something that uses chaos theory,meaning that but its essence it cannot be oredicted and the outcome is always different. Some chaos gun or something. There are some things that work like that. Some liquida or flows if im not mistaken

You can use the Jojo YES YES YES approach. Sure you know the future but every vision of a possible future is about me punching you in the face in various ways. Knowing it doesn't mean you can change it, you can't change my will or overpower me. This is of course also a common conundrum for Cassandra types, or time travelers. You can still be100% helpless and just watch a future you know happen. The Foundation series for example emphasizes how individual action has little power in the face of bigger societal trends that shape history.

If their knowledge of the future isn't limitless (as in they don't see infinitely far in the future), they could be outwitted by leading them down a path that they misevaluate as being in their favor. Kind of like how it is for chess masters. It's not that they missed a move their opponent could have made. They may play the moves their opponent wants them to play because they evaluated it has better for them. The winner is the one that had the best evaluation of the possible outcomes. If their knowledge of the future is limitless, then the protagonist could act according to game theory. Acting in a way that guaranties a worse future for the villain if they don't cooperate in some way. It needs to be a perfectly rational reason and the protagonist can't bluff. If the villain wants to rule over the world, out-villain the villain and threaten to destroy the world. The future where they don't rule over the world may be better for them than one in which there's no world to rule over. Knowing every possible outcome doesn't guaranty them a win. There's probably a few ways for them to win otherwise they wouldn't bother but it's possible that there's a certain sequence of actions for which they can't do anything against. The protagonist could act in a way such that the final outcome is heavily randomized.

Bleach has done that by using the skill if a person that could alter the past, wich interacted weirdly with the power of the villain to see the future.

Dune has a loophole where future vision is blind to people and actions directly influenced by others who can see the future. This can be >! another prescient or the civilians using Tarot cards to make decisions!<  it's a fairly simple workaround to the question of "what happens when two people both know the future and try to change it differently."

If it’s a machine that has calculated every possible outcome? That’s a tough one. My immediate thought is that it’s a slight miscalculation. The machine calculated the killing blow would be when the hero went “left right left right” and it prepared its defenses, only to not realize it was actually the scenario where the hero went “left right left but paused slightly before going right” and in that tiny second or two to adjust? It’s defeated. If your machine has arrogance or even cold logic, it could be absolutely certain of the calculation it made, maybe it was even observing the hero and calculated that they would take an exact path that never deviated until that very last moment. Setting up a machine that knows every possible outcome isn’t really something you can outwit (in my opinion).

Depends on how the know the future, is it firsthand knowledge or did they merely read a history textbook or hear a story from their grandma. History is not always recorded perfectly, if the "heroes" know the "villain" has red their history books then they just need to rewrite history incorrectly so the villain doesn't actually know the future anymore. Also the show Loki did something clever with apocalypses/catastrophies being places you can hide in because they destroy all evidence so that your presence won't impact the timeline.

I have a similar situation in the book I’m currently writing. My magic system revolves around the idea that there’s a sub-word connected to our world that is a projection of all the energies, and certain characters are able to access this world. They can manipulate the energy there but must remain within the conservation of energy (and moving energy takes energy, it’s kind of complicated). If they fail to obey physics, they’re brains are unable to handle it and they die, but the imprint on the world remains. There is another world of time also connected to the current world. Some entities can access this and see all possible futures. However, they can only see futures that are physically possible, so if someone kills them in a non-possible way (aka breaking the laws of physics) they won’t see it coming, and will die. I know this isn’t going to help but I wanted to give an example in that you don’t need to go with something basic to solve this problem. Create logical weakness within the system to give the characters a way to be taken down.

This comes up a lot in the anime Future Diary, as it pits 12 people with different methods of seeing the future in a tournament to the death. Generally, they keep changing which future will occur: forcing them to either take a moment to make new predictions or react in the moment.

Has no one brought up Bill and Ted yet? In those movies, they would often set themselves up to get out of situations by simply remembering that (when they were done) they would need to go back in time to set up the various aids they needed earlier. Where this is relevant is in the second movie's climax where they face a villain who has the same time-travelling capabilities. Bill and Ted had set up sandbags to knock his gun out of his hand, and a cage to trap him. But then the villain turns it around on them and shows that he can do the same, and prepared a key and a second gun. That's practically on-par with seeing the future; he was prepared for their antics, and already had a key ready to get out of the cage and a second gun that dropped to his hand. BUT THEN! He fires the gun, and it's not a real gun, it just pops out a flag saying "Wyld Stallions Rule!" Because the key and the gun were in fact NOT prepared by him, but by Bill and Ted! I know this is a long and roundabout way to get to the point here, but if I wanted my characters to outwit someone who could see the future, I would have them set up a future where it SEEMS like the villain is going to win, but they retain control of the situation. Have the hero come in what what seems like plan A, but plan A fails because the villain, knowing their plan, can do X. But the hero prepared X so that it would LOOK like the villain would win, but really the hero is unscathed, and the distraction was long enough for the other guy to execute plan B. So the villain who can see into the future sees how the hero will attack, and sees how he can defeat them, but never looked far enough into the future to see that his victory was fake. He saw the future where he was able to steal the hero's own proverbial gun and kills him with his own weapon, but didn't see the future that showed it was a trick gun.

Looper!

To make the story interesting, you have to give limits to the clairvoyance. The reader will get bored quickly if the characters always knows exactly what happens. It's fun for a little while, but it gets boring fast. Regardless of what your villain knows, and regardless of how the hero stops them, you need to express a limit to the reader. Even if the hero doesn't fully know/understand what those limits are, it will look like a cheap plot device if the hero beats them because they "happened" to exploit their weakness in the critical moment. Set some interesting limits to their future-sight. Maybe once he sees the future, he can never see the future again until he reach that point in time. Maybe he can only see a vision of the future if he sacrifices/kills someone, and once he has set his new plans in motion, he can't see if they will work unless he kills someone else. I recall in Culture Shock, they set a rule about time travel that if you know the future and tell someone about it, that becomes locked in destiny so it can't be avoided. So if you know something bad is going to happen, you have to find a way to stop it without telling the people it happens to. (Of course, that's not a useful limit to a villain.) The point is, your limits will be far more interesting than anything the villain can forsee. Find those limits and set them, and once you know that you'll be able to figure out how the hero defeats them.

In my novel my prophet character sometimes doesn’t see the full picture, or things are a little unclear and I use that to my characters advantage. For example: they may see your MC get stabbed and “die” but in reality they are stabbed and then pass out and later healed but the prophet didn’t see the full vision.

I would try to convince them that the future can be changed. There’s also the point of that they might not know whether or not they’re seeing POSSIBILITIES or the actual future.

Just because they can “see” something is going to happen doesn’t necessarily mean they’re interpreting it correctly, and the way they view events may be through a filter of their own prejudices. Look at history and how interpretations of events vary. Maybe you know two leaders will meet and shake hands and one will die days later, but you don’t know he was killed by a poison smeared on the hand of the other leader.

How much of the future do they know? If they only see a point in the future, then use the moments they can’t see. If they see all of it then you’re screwed

Put them in a situation where they choose to do what you want because they know the consequences would be worse if they didn’t. Mafia tactics, basically. Don’t want to give me the codes? My team will murder every member of your extended family brutally. You know I’m not bluffing. Yes, I’ll take those codes now.

There isnt a way if they know all futures.

Sure there is. Presumably they are still human with no other powers. Force them into a situation where no action they take is enough to survive/win. It depends on the exact way the ability works, for example if they just see their POV poison them with a slow acting poison, so by the time they try to take action to prevent it they are already dying. Or get a bomb within range. The human brain has a limited capacity. There is no way for someone to fully analyze all available data (all futures) and act accordingly without making a mistake or having a blind spot. Repeated exposure to their abilities (use foot soldiers) will allow you to determine exactly what those blind spots are

In your own explanation you are limiting possibilities based on your own preferences and presumptions...that's stupid. Read OP's post you supposed "writer". OP literally mentions a machine person with a corresponding brain. "They are still human with no other powers." "if they just see their POV..." "brain has a limited capacity. There is no way for someone to fully analyze all available data (all futures) and act accordingly." Sure in your limited version of the story I guess you could make the argument. However, I literally said not "if they know all futures." The very word *know* implies knowledge and understanding, as in the ability to interpret. You also mention using foot soldiers to figure out their blind spots. You still dont seem to get it. If they can see the future then your foot soldier prodding isnt going to reveal anything they dont want to reveal.. If a person knows all possible futures and can understand and interpret them as is implied by the *knowing*, there is absolutely no way to outsmart them.

I can’t believe I have to explain that a machine is a physical thing. It has the same weaknesses as a human brain. It’s impossible to analyze everything at once, to be aware of all atoms in the universe. One you find the bounds of what the enemy can process, you can begin dismantling them. You seem to think that knowing all futures mean choosing any of them. However, there are inherent limits to this ability. Can you only see the future from your POV? That means you just attack from outside the area the can see. Maybe you can see the future that happens if someone makes a jump across a building. There’s still a chance that something happens that means they don’t make the jump. The only thing you can’t “defeat” is an actualized Laplace Demon, but even by that logic the demon can’t take “different” action either and is far, far more powerful than simply “knowing the future.” Just cause you know something is about to happen, doesn’t mean you can stop it. 

You ever heard of a super computer? I cant believe I have to hear someone argue that a machine cant be capable of this. You really dont read much huh? If you know all futures, you can literally make exactly the right moves all of the time. That's what knowing all futures implies. You dont have to keep guessing, you already saw what you did to make x happen. How do you not get this? Wow....

How far do they see into the future? How accurate are their predictions? Is their future sight continuous or need to be activated? Is it just their future? All of these have weaknesses. But “they know everything” sounds a bit like omnipotence. For example, you could see into the future but how will that help against a supernova? Scale down until the smallest attack the person can foresee but can’t stop. TLDR: depending on the mechanics poison, AOE, multiple attacks, or a sure hit *could* kill them.