You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

michaelcurzi comments on April Fools - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Joke Chapter - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: shokwave 02 April 2012 02:47AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (42)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: michaelcurzi 03 April 2012 12:07:26AM 1 point [-]

Is the idea that he would break the story by transfiguring an FAI? (Is that possible?)

Comment author: bogdanb 03 April 2012 09:08:50AM 2 points [-]

What pedanterrific says. There’s lots of artifacts that display computing abilities (the Sorting Hat being the foremost example) which suggest that you don’t need to explicitly transfigure computing hardware (which is suggested not to work around magic anyway), you can probably just specify the software requirements and they get implemented somehow.

Comment author: pedanterrific 03 April 2012 01:18:53AM 2 points [-]

I'm gonna go with "no".

Comment author: Dorikka 03 April 2012 04:49:17AM 0 points [-]

I don't think that it would be necessary to literally transfigure an AGI. Since it's possible to cast spells which react in a certain way to a trigger/specific change in surroundings, there's likely potential for creating artifices on the complexity level of scripts/programs using spells.

I think it would take quite a while to advance this science to the point where it could create an AGI (perhaps sped along depending on how easily it was integrated with Muggle computer science), but I think that if HJPEV thought about creating powerful optimization processes using magic which actually did what he intended, a huge power boost would result. Especially because AFAIK, the wizarding world has no parallel to programming, so only Muggleborns would really have a hope of understanding what he was doing.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 April 2012 03:30:49AM 0 points [-]

I dunno how he would break the story but the AI stuff is the only stuff I can think of that Harry doesn't draw on that would have external story-breaking power.

Maybe I'm just not creative enough to break the story with metaethics or fun theory.