In a previous story, EY posted the penultimate chapter along with an ultimatum: You will earn a Bad Ending by doing nothing, and a Good Ending by guessing, following the internal logic of the story, what the correct solution to this problem is.
The problem could be solved by combining a revelation in the latest chapter with information from an infodump in the first chapter, explaining how space travel worked in universe.
It was in fact solved, and he posted both endings.
This is the danger, that he may do the same thing here, and we must be ready to solve the problem.
I doubt it will be much of an issue however, the raw processing power we have to work with here is much higher, since HPMOR is much more popular than Three Worlds Collide.
I think he's never going to do that here. He did that in TWC because if we were able to come up with the winning strategy when pressed, that would indicate that one of the crew members in the story definitely would have, too, proving it would have been unreasonable to write an ending where they did not. In this case our ability to solve the puzzle doesn't really say anything about the plausibility of the work's characters' solving it. Our success would not necessitate theirs, as we're more populous, experienced, and have access to a huge written record. Nor would our failure necessitate theirs, as Harry has magical insights. The groups' capacities say little about each other.
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 98. The previous thread is at nearly 500 comments.
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, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26.
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: