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Did anyone archive the April Fool's chapter from ff.net?
An obvious answer would be birth certificates.
From a Muggle point of view, maybe. From a Wizard point of view, that's probably the least obvious answer.
Your name is your name, and no piece of paper can grant it or take it away.
If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that a person's name would be something like "$givenName $familyName", such as "Harry Potter" or "Albus Dumbledore". The givenName is the name your parents gave you when you were a baby. The family name is the name of your Noble House ("Malfoy", "Potter", etc.), or simply the last name which your parents share ("Granger"). This is the naming convention that (as per my guess) wizards and witches have been using since the time of Merlin, so it's reasonable to assume that the creators of the Map imbued it with the same rules.
As to the question, "yes, but how does the Map compute the values of givenName and familyName for any specific person", the answer is, "Magic".
Your name is your name, and no piece of paper can grant it or take it away.
If the world of HPMOR is some sort of simulation, as you claim, then this is true and significant; your name exists as a fixed value that can be referenced by a program like the Map. But if the world of HPMOR is more like our own, then to say "your name is your name" is pretty empty; like most everything else, there is an explanation of why your name is your name. In our world, what makes it true that we bear the names we do is not that we all have own values for the variable $name. Rather, what makes it true is some other fact; one possibility (one that I don't believe myself) is that what makes it true that my name is Alex is the fact that my birth certificate reads 'Alex'.
So I think our disagreement arises from what we think the world of HPMOR is like.
I couldn't swear to it, but I thought the map showed Krum in GoF.
It's not clear. When Crouch is confessing everything under Veritaserum, he says that he saw his father entering the grounds on the Map, and so headed into the grounds to intercept him. He says something along the lines of "Then Potter came, and Krum", and it's ambiguous as to whether he sees them appear on the Map or if he sees them him person.
Cool. I hope someone does it.
Well, someone already did do it; now the question is whether we need part 13 before tomorrow night.
This discussion reminds me of the "Bag of zahav" experiment of Chapter 6.
And therefore the answer is "Magic, Mr. Potter" and "It just uses your name." This doesn't predict much, but it allows us to eliminate obviously nonmagical hypotheses like a database that reads in names announced during Sorting. That's just not how the Hogwarts founders would have thought about the problem.
I guess that a baby that hasn't yet received a name would be known as "Mr. Potter" or "The Potter baby" or something equally vague.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12
That's just not how the Hogwarts founders would have thought about the problem.
That doesn't mean the Founders could do the impossible. Saying that "it just uses your name" might be true, but it doesn't tell us how it can use your name. There must be a way that it works (although it may very well be that there is no consistent way-that-it-works that can be extracted from the text). Compare this to another example in which the creator of an artifact "thought about the problem" differently:
Broomsticks had been invented during what a Muggle would have called the Dark Ages, supposedly by a legendary witch named Celestria Relevo, allegedly the great-great-granddaughter of Merlin.
Celestria Relevo, or whichever person or group had really invented those enchantments, hadn't known a darned thing about Newtonian mechanics.
Broomsticks, therefore, worked by Aristotelian physics.
They went where you pointed them (ch 59).
Broomsticks don't work the way we would expect them to work, because that's not how Celestria Relevo thought about the problem, but that doesn't meant there isn't a way that they work.
My stab at what Harry could do:
As repayment for Hermione's blood debt towards the Malfoy family, he should offer himself - offer to serve the Malfoy family for a year, or until Hermione is cleared of the charge. Accepting this would not be a loss of face for Lucius, and there is already precedent - the way Crabbe and Goyle serve Draco.
This feels implausible, but, given that Lucius seems to think that Harry is Voldemort, it would be tempting.
Actually, that's even better- we have a known mechanism by which (something that could be hooked up to) the Hogwarts wards can read minds to determine names. So it actually doesn't require some extraneous piece of paper or database or whatever, but on the other hand would only work on people who've been Sorted.
So no foreign professors!
Maybe it works by a registry of current and former students and faculty at Hogwarts, and people who are neither show up as "Intruder (number)" or something. In modern Wizarding Britain this would include basically everyone.
I mean, if the Founders created the Map as part of the Hogwarts security system, they wouldn't have been all that concerned with putting a name on everyone who could possibly step foot on the grounds, they'd just want to be able to locate students and differentiate them from anyone else.
I can't remember, did the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang delegations show up on the Map in GoF? Not that it really matters, the canon!Map and MoR!Map are different enough that it wouldn't be much evidence.
This theory, unlike the birth certificate one, can easily explain how the Map matches people with names. During the Sorting, McGonagall reads aloud a name, and the next person who puts on the Sorting Hat is assigned that name. (Assuming the Hat is hooked up to the security system, or vice versa.)
Other than the "external database" option, the only other sources of name information I can think of are:
- The mind of the person being mapped
- The mind of the person reading the map
- A sort of consensus of how everyone in Hogwarts knows someone
I feel that picking someone's name from their own mind seems the most elegant and consistent. It doesn't handle babies (Before the parents choose a name, can a baby even be said to have one? Babies would have to be special-cased regardless), but it does allow arbitrary people to be mapped (multiple strangers being indistinguishable from each other seems like a serious flaw in a security system) and requires no external registry. On the one hand, it seems like interrogating the mind of every human is vastly more complicated than just looking up the name in a database, but to the kind of epistemology which would seem obvious to a 9th-century witch or wizard I can see it being "obvious".
(And to respond to your question about Pettigrew in the great-grandparent, I would assume that the map skips over animals entirely, which would probably include animagi. This would tend to lend a slight amount of weight to my "the map displays your name as you know it" theory, as if the names came from how everyone else around you knew you there would be no reason not to include pets.)
If my theory is true, it raises an additional interesting question: Is it possible to obliviate yourself selectively so that you lose all knowledge of your own name? (Possibly storing the memories in a pensieve first so you can recover them later) And if so, is the map the only piece of the Hogwarts security system which might be impeded by this?
A further idea: Professor Quirrel is shown to take a very loose approach to identity and names ("Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people.") Possibly Quirrelmort is the constant error, not because his name is wrong, but because he doesn't have a name attached to his marker at all.
Is it possible to obliviate yourself selectively so that you lose all knowledge of your own name?
In Quirrell's case, he may be a powerful enough Occulumens to prevent the Map from reading his mind and so learning his name (if your theory is correct).
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I would guess that the author sees conservation of energy as pretty important also. I would not be at all surprised if souls really exist in the HPMoR universe.
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