Dumbledore could have created several similar final-rooms, equally protected, and placed the rooms meant for students in front of one of the wrong ones.
Then he would expect Voldemort, using something like a map or scrying or just being clever, to know that the student rooms weren't the real trap and so those are a waste of effort.
But how would Voldemort know the other rooms even existed, or where they were in Hogwarts (before he acquired the Map)?
He knows about these rooms because Dumbledore deliberately drew the whole school's attention to them, and when Voldemort tried looking in, he saw very powerful spells guarding them. That sounds exactly like a trap to me. And a trap is something you set even if you anticipate a low chance of success.
The one reason so far to believe these are the right rooms (though I am not fully convinced) is that Snape was guarding them.
New long chapter! Since I expect its discussion to generate more than 160 comments (which would push the previous thread over the 500 comment limit) before the next chapter is posted, here is a new thread.
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 108
(and chapter 109, once it comes out on Monday).EDIT: There have now been two separate calls for having one thread per chapter, along with a poll in this thread. If the poll in this thread indicates a majority preference for one thread per chapter by Monday, I will edit this post to make it for chapter 108 only. In that case a new thread for chapter 109 should be posted by whoever gets a chance and wants to after the chapter is released.
EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.
There is 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.)
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: