It reads like a very forced solution - there would be significant gains to one noble house going against the tradition, so their heir could have several years of Hogwarts students rally behind them - and also kind of impossible to implement, given that we don't know much about their birth control methods

That doesn't make it impossible to implement, it just means it draws on implicit background information we don't have access to.

Considering the edges that wizards appear to have on muggles in terms of medical care, I suspect that not only do they have access to effective magical contraception, they also have access to magical methods of conception promotion.

War. With children.

I fear the consequences if we don't solve this.

Edit: I'm serious:

This was actually intended as a dry run for a later, serious “Solve this or the story ends sadly” puzzle

Isn't there a simpler (and nicer) solution than Hermione-corpse-transfigured-to-ring, or Hermione-corpse-transfigured-to-gem-then-swapped? Both of these seem unduly complicated and ghoulish.

The nicer solution is that whatever Harry was doing between Hermione's death and dinner-time, he has already succeeded. Harry has somehow set up a time marker by which his future self can travel back to restore Hermione to life (or pass himself some sort of message back telling him how to do it) and she is already resurrected and out of here.

Presumably the plan also involved him selectively obliviating himself, so that he would retain the motivation to work out how to do the impossible in the future, while being quite relaxed about little details like the missing body.

An interesting question is how did he get round the 6 hour limit? Are there any hints in the story so far on the solution? Some thoughts:

• Phoenix travel
• Forcing a prophecy and deciphering it
• The ritual described at the head of Chapter 1
• Looping himself multiple times around the same 6 hours
• Some variant on the factoring trick, to force himself to receive knowledge of a working resurrection spell which he will invent at a later date, or else create a paradox in the present. Only this time, he's determined enough to make it work, and not be distracted by any "DON'T MESS WITH TIME" messages...

I don't think this is what Jonah is talking about. This is just one of thousands of examples of formal verification of safety-critical software.

The Prover company is working on the safety of train signalling software. Basically, they seek to prove that a given program is "safe" along a number of formal criteria. It involves the translation of the program in some (boolean based) standard form, which is then analysed.

The formal criteria are chosen manually, but the proofs are found completely automatically.

Despite the sizeable length of the proofs, combinatorial explosion is generally avoided, because programs written by humans (and therefore their standard form translation) tend to have shapes that lend them amenable to massive cuts in the search tree.

It doesn't always work: first, the criteria are simple and bounded. Second, combinatorial explosion sometimes does occur, in which case human-devised tweaks are needed.

Oh, and it's all proprietary. Maybe there's some related academic papers, though.

Two interesting observations: The most recent utterances of the words "temporal pressure" (similar to the titles of these last two chapters) was in chapter 86 when discussing the Halls of Prophecy:

""The Hall of Prophecy," Minerva whispered. She'd read about that place, said to be a great room of shelves filled with glowing orbs, one after another appearing over the years. Merlin himself had wrought it, it was said; the greatest wizard's final slap to the face of Fate. Not all prophecies conduced to the good; and Merlin had wished for at least those spoken of in prophecy, to know what had been spoken of them. That was the respect Merlin had given to their free will, that Destiny might not control them from the outside, unwitting. Those mentioned within a prophecy would have an glowing orb float to their hand, and then hear the prophet's true voice speaking. Others who tried to touch an orb, it was said, would be driven mad - or possibly just have their heads explode, the legends were unclear on this point. Whatever Merlin's original intention, the Unspeakables hadn't let anyone enter in centuries, so far as she'd heard. Works of the Ancient Wizards had stated that later Unspeakables had discovered that tipping off the subjects of prophecies could interfere with seers releasing whatever temporal pressures they released; and so the heirs of Merlin had sealed his Hall. It did occur to Minerva to wonder (now that she'd spent a few months around Mr. Potter) how anyone could possibly know that; but she also knew better than to ask Albus, in case Albus tried to tell her. Minerva firmly believed that you only ought to worry about Time if you were a clock."

Next, near the end of chapter 89, Harry "turns away from Dumbledore" twice, almost as if there's a kink in time after explicitly mentioning "pressure":

Harry opened his mouth to scream out all his fury, and then closed it again. There wasn't any point in screaming, it wouldn't accomplish anything. The unbearable pressure rising inside him couldn't be let out that way.

'Harry turned away from Dumbledore and looked down at where the remains of Hermione Granger were lying in a pool of blood ... another part of him already knew that this event was real, part of the same flawed world that included Azkaban and the Wizengamot chamber and

No

With a fracturing feeling, as though time was still torn to pieces around him, Harry turned away from Dumbledore and looked down at the remains of Hermione Granger lying in a pool of blood with two tourniquets tied around her thigh-stumps, and decided

No.

I do not accept this."

Hypothesis: Something very strange just happened to Time around Harry, possibly involving a time turner, and things are definitely not as they seem.

It's almost as if someone is trying to manipulate Harry's reaction to these events, like when H&C tricks Hermione repeatedly. Fred and George are unconscious at this point, too. It goes without saying that Harry is probably an unreliable narrator.

Would someone in that state have any way of speaking? Or do we assume that the Law of Dramatic Death Scenes is written into a magician's powers?

The dramatic death scene was my interpretation, but I don't have much experience with people dying violently (thankfully). I don't know how realistic dramatic death scenes are or how much wizardly fortitude is worth.

As I've already pointed out to another infinite set atheist, you could get the appearance of a continuous wavefunction without actually requiring infinite computing power to simulate it. All you need to do is make the simulation lazy - add more trailing digits in a just-in-time fashion.

Whether or not that counts as complicating the rules for the purpose of solomonoff induction is.. hard to say.

Endless, negligible, and not at all. Reference every atheism argument ever.

It didn't help, in my particular case, that one of my first interactions on LW was in fact with someone who appears to have their own view about a continuous version of quantum mechanics.

Continuous in the sense of, like, continuous energy levels? Because if so, wow.