So the Patronum is between Harry and each and every one of the death eaters? That seems dubious, unless he's wearing it like a suit.

Also, they been instructed to use different attacks, so unless the Patronus blocks everything I don't think it'd stop everything that would come his way.

"Expecto Patronum", at which point Death-Eaters will fire an utterly futile barrage of AKs. Voldy still can't fire directly at Harry due to resonance. Gun is not as much concern if you move fast enough and considering Voldy is some distance away. Gives Harry enough elbow room to get to his nearby (?) Pouch, Cloak and Time-Turner with 1 more hour on it. At this point we're sorta free of any serious constraints.

I show not your face but your coherent extrapolated volition

I got shivers when I read that and realized what the Mirror was. Another thing that ought to have been obvious, in hindsight.

I immediately thought of Eliezer's metaphor of the brain as "the lens that perceives its own flaws", and reflective consistency.

I'm developing a low-level strongly typed virtual machine suitable for running thought processes with provable program properties, and which result in checkable partial execution traces with cryptographically strong bounds on honest vs fraudulent work. Such a framework meets the needs for a strong AI boxing setup.

I quit my job for one that I'm much less comfortable with, but with more room for long-term improvement.

In your face, risk aversion!

Yes, but if a company has assets then in bankruptcy often both it's assets and some of its liabilities get transferred. Say Alcor goes bankrupt and a judge has to decide what to do with Alcor's bodies and its assets. The judge would be more likely to give the assets to an organization that was likely to preserve the bodies.

For-profit companies have more incentives than Alcor does to take risks that deliberately expose themselves to the risk of bankruptcy. When a company goes bankrupt it's assets (and often many of its obligations) are not destroyed, rather they are often transferred to another organization.

Interesting. I'll look into that when/if I have some free time. In the meantime, may I suggest gamifying this at some point? Let MIRI organize a programming competition in Botworld, preferably with prizes. If this plays well, you'll get a lot of attention from some highly skilled hackers and maybe some publicity.

Reminds me of Core War. Only that the cells were single memory locations. There are no 'actors' - if you could call it that because cells had no owner; only execution threads have.

Maybe some insights can be derived by comparing the significant experience with Core Wards programs. For example There was no single winning strategy but kind of rock-paper-scissors types of programs. It also allos analysis and exploitation of opponents code - albeit at a very low level.

ADDED: The advantage of this model (which has been used to study evolution of actors) is that it is extremely simple. The disadvantage is that the effect per computation is very high: A simple loop can alter a sizable fraction of the 'world' within short time. Thus no complex analysis of opponents never pays off (except for tests like 'is some opponent at this address').

I like your bot-world as it is kind of a hybrid of other bot worlds and core wars in that it does allow inspection. But I think it's complexity (robots, parts, items, inspection, cells; esp. the winning condition) doesn't cut directly to the problem at hand. The key point missing in core wars is a limit to physical reach. Using a limit to the range of mov-instructions would have made a significant difference - even without going to 2D or 3D (actually that complicates reasoning). Or if mov instructions took more time the further they reach.

I agree that a more gradual winning criteria than dead/alive (as in core wars) would help direct the search for more efficient programs.

See also: The AI Challenge - Ants Article