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FAWS comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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62: Huh, somehow (nearly?) everyone who speculated how Harry would get out of that one forgot that they hand out time machines to children so they can attend more classes.
Including Dumbledore and Snape and McGonnagal! Who really should know better. They speculate that Harry was forced to use his Time-Turner for the Dark Lord, but they don't even think to check up on all the other children who have one? For shame.
But they only suspect Harry because of Dumbledore's stumbling onto paradox at Mary's Place.
The paradox tells them that the perpetrators used a Time-Turner to send messages back in time. TTs are generally locked to a single person's use; someone else can't come along, steal or take the TT by force, and use it for themselves. They explicitly say they suspect someone might have forced Harry to use his TT in this way. They are fools not to check if someone forced or tricked another child to use their TT.
Also, they check if Harry can still use his TT that day because they suspect him. But they do not treat him as an adversary. Flitwick doesn't question him closely to make sure the Harry in front of him really just came back 6 hours in time. It would be trivial to ask him questions interactively to prove that, instead of just have him pass a message. Minerva should have had the message say: "Filius, please question Harry to make extremely sure that he just came back 6 hours in time!"
Indeed, Dumbledore and his allies are being somewhat less than maximally clever here... it would make more sense if they simply didn't know about the other student with a Time Turner because it was an unauthorized copy, or something. (And it's quite apparent that Time Turners are far more common in the MoR-verse than in canon, Hermione was only able to get one in book 3 was said to be a very unusual event which was only happened because the staff had an extraordinarily high level of trust in her.)
After noticing the effects of Harry's Patronus 2.0, I think that Dumbledore would have suspected Harry regardless.
Didn't he tell Amelia Bones that he suspected two possibilities as they were racing to get far enough away from Azkaban to Phoenix Fire away? He hadn't discovered the paradox yet at that point.
I think the missing insight was that there were students who would be willing to convey messages back in time with no explanation and keep their mouths shut.
I'm definitely a bit confused on how this is expected to work, unless the additional money is for bribing Professor Flitwick (which seems unlikely to work), seeing as how McGonagall explicitly asks whether Harry gave him the message. Then again, if he doesn't know what is being tested for, he might not know that its not being delivered in person is a problem... though he would probably find Margaret's insistence that she was delivering a message from McGonagall on behalf of Harry a bit strange - normally you just specify who the message is from and who it's to; why would he care about an additional messenger? OTOH you would expect this sort of testing to be not so unusual and thus expect Flitwick to know what was the point was.
...yeah, I'm definitely still confused about this. Alternative hypothesis: Harry has failed McGonagall's test, he just hasn't heard about it yet.
EDIT: ...oh. I just realized she would be conveying the message to Harry, not Flitwick. Nevermind. I ignored that possibility. (Assuming he was there at 3 PM...)
Harry picked up the message in the empty class room while invisible, decoded it and told Flitwick the message. He was already waiting there because Quirrel had anticipated that he would be subjected to a test of this sort. It's all in the chapter.
It wasn't til around this post that I realized that Harry's plan was going to work. I was thinking the situation was something like Harry at 9 PM being Time-Turned from 9 PM +t, so that by the laws of time, no piece of information from him could travel back past 3 PM +t. I think I can see now that that wouldn't have made sense, but now I'm back to DanArmak's question.
Someone somewhere proposed something that included sneaking in and using Dumbledore's time turner.
...Which is weird, because unless they want to prohibit students from taking certain pairs of electives, no two classes should take place simultaneously for any given house and year.
That is an oddity. However, note that they don't have computers, and setting up a schedule properly for everyone who's signed up for whatever classes seems like it might well be incredibly difficult without same. It could be that someone saw this and said 'F* it, just give them time machines.' That would certainly fit with the level of sense shown so far in magical Britain.
I now declare this MoR!canon.
I've been to college and suffered the frustration of trying to juggle classes that take place at inconvenient times relative to each other. But we don't seem to have the conflicts divulged to the students. Hermione "just signs up for everything", she doesn't say "gosh, it looks like this class and that one conflict, so I'll have to pick one - but I can't choose! Aaah! - Professor McGonagall, isn't there something you could do?!"
They do, however, have magic. And if there are charms that specifically identify trash to clean, then there must be charms that can organize words on parchment according to a few simple rules.
The rules are not that simple. School timetabling is NP-hard and even stimulated annealing is unlikely to get it completely correct.
The rules are simple. So are the rules for Go.
I had to look up whether that was, in fact, a new kind of optimisation algorithm. It certainly sounds like it should be. ;)
I assumed that it was well-known since I learnt about it in first-year computing (nearly 7 years ago now..). In retrospect, that was probably a silly assumption.
I think the joke is that you wrote "stimulated annealing" rather than "simulated annealing".
Oh! I always that was a valid alternate spelling of the same word. My bad.
Almost unrelated words. From thefreedictionary.com: simulate stimulate.
Ok, objection noted. My first sentence, however, stands and they still have magic.
Though this might be a matter similar to the clocks - nobody has thought of doing it, so it hasn't been done.
I should probably have been clearer: the reason classes are often scheduled at the same time is because it's impossible not to. You have some amount of staff, each of whom have to teach some amount of lower level and/or elective classes, and then you have a couple hundred students each of whom pick 5-7 (or whatever it is, I haven't read the books recently) electives in whatever combination most appeals to them. The chances of not having a collision anywhere in the whole timetable are pretty damn low. Non-magical schools deal with collisions by forcing students with unpopular combinations to change one of their options (which is what my school did), or by offering a an extra class during lunch or outside regular school hours (which I've heard of other schools doing)
And house elves. There are almost certainly spirits of intellect they could summon too! If not, they have had time to do plenty of selective breeding on their chattel. That said... HP wizard authorities are really thick when it comes to these things.
It's not that weird. School timetabling is hard (probably NP-hard, since the best way to do it by computer is stimulated annealing followed by human tweaks. In reality it's pretty much always done entirely by hand), and it's normal in regular schools for uncommon elective pairs (for example, computing and art) to be scheduled at the same time.
After reading that Bones and Dumbledore had timeturners, and remembering that if the ministry hands them out to schoolchildren, I thought probably any ministry official rating an iPhone, Blackberry, or Franklin Planner would have one as well. So, certainly the Dark Lord should/could/would have recognized their utility and gathered a few for his side.