So you're thinking of something like this?
Alice: Okay, it's almost noon, and we've been sitting alone in this room for some hours now without seeing Carol, and this plan has been in place since last night. Bob, you wait until 6pm, and then check to see if the enemy has reached the pass yet. If they haven't, come back and tell me. But if they have, stay when you are - and if I don't hear from you at noon, I'll go back to 6am and tell Carol.
And then Carol-at-6am has information about whether the enemy has reached the pass at 6pm?
Yeah. You can actually make arbitrarily long chains. You have each person go back in time and stop the next person if they're not stopped. You "start" the chain at the end, and depending on when you do it, you can send back one bit. For example, you give Alice, Bob, Carol, and Daniel time turners. At midnight, Alice goes back to stop Daniel if Bob doesn't stop her, at 6:00 AM, Bob goes back to stop Alice unless Carol stops him, etc. If the enemy attacks on the night of the 28th, Daniel stops Carol. If they don't, he doesn't. This means that if th...
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: