toner comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 110 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The mirror and efficient simulation
Until the mirror appeared, the HPMOR universe could be simulated efficiently, at least as far as we knew. Time travel is limited to a six-hour cache; you can't transfigure arbitrary things, and Harry's attempts to use time travel to solve computational problems failed. This is likely to be deliberate.
So, how does the mirror exist? According to the inscription on the back, the mirror shows the actor's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV). Is this possible to compute efficiently from an actor's source code? I would guess not. (Is this right? Is there a hardness proof?)
Here are some possibilities to preserve efficient simulation:
Self-consitant time travel seems far harder to simulate than CEV.