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DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, January 2015, chapter 103 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: b_sen 29 January 2015 01:44AM

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Comment author: William_Quixote 29 January 2015 02:54:47PM 0 points [-]

A spell to grade tests is probably not an old spell that's been around forever since no one else seems to use it, but QQ may have invented it for this purpose.

Either way, it's existence is a further hint to the nature of magic in the world of HPMOR. It involves some pretty sophiscated natural languge processing. The fact that magic can do natural language processing is hinted as significant in chapter 6 while Harry is studying the retrieval charm and trying diffent phrases that point to "bag of gold". If we knew how magic could read a test and predict what the ministry would give it, we would know a lot more about magic.

Note, we can reject the hypothesis the the spell just doing something simple like implements a big data style algorithm with 800 years of prior tests and grades as its training corpus because QQs students are going to be writing answers that are very different from the training set and so the model wouldn't have good predictive power

Comment author: DanArmak 29 January 2015 03:17:04PM 3 points [-]

The spell might just be querying Quirrel or a confederate in real-time to grade the results.

Comment author: gjm 29 January 2015 03:17:53PM 5 points [-]

Yes. Note that Q is terrifyingly fast; remember the scene where he speed-reads the newspaper.

Comment author: gjm 29 January 2015 09:50:25PM 4 points [-]

Though now it's been pointed out by others, I agree it's pretty much certain that the actually intended meaning is that Q is joking, he ignored their answers to the official exam, and their grades were determined before they ever took it.

Comment author: DanArmak 29 January 2015 07:48:23PM 0 points [-]

And even more relevantly, the scene where he sits in his office, grading papers, not moving anything but his eyes.

Comment author: gjm 29 January 2015 09:28:36PM 0 points [-]

It's not clear he's doing it super-fast on that occasion, though, is it?

Comment author: DanArmak 29 January 2015 10:12:17PM 0 points [-]

That's true.