Moody always told them to survive a hundred years of hunting Dark Wizards and then get back to him about that.
Mad-Eye Moody had once worked out how long it had taken him, in retrospect, to achieve what he now considered a decent level of caution—weighed up how much experience it had taken him to get good instead of lucky—and had begun to suspect that most people died before they got there. Moody had once expressed this thought to Lyall, who had done some ciphering and figuring, and told him that a typical Dark Wizard hunter would die, on average, eight and a half times along the way to becoming ‘paranoid’. This explained a great deal, assuming Lyall wasn’t lying.
Yesterday, Albus Dumbledore had told Mad-Eye Moody that the Dark Lord had used unspeakable dark arts to survive the death of his body, and was now awake and abroad, seeking to regain his power and begin the Wizarding War anew.
Under standard literary convention… the enemy wasn’t supposed to look over what you’d done, sabotage the magic items you’d handed out, and then send out a troll rendered undetectable by some means the heroes couldn’t figure out even after the fact, so that you might as well have not defended yourself at all. In a book, the point-of-view usually stayed on the main characters. Having the enemy just bypass all the protagonists’ work, as a result of planning and actions taken out of literary sight, would be a diabolus ex machina, and dramatically unsatisfying.
But in real life the enemy would think that they were the main character, and they would also be clever, and think things through in advance, even if you didn’t see them do it. That was why everything about this felt so disjointed, with parts unexplained and seemingly inexplicable.
“You may think that a grade of Dreadful… is not fair. That Miss Granger was faced with a test… for which her lessons… had not prepared her. That she was not told… that the exam was coming on that day.”
Recalling finewbs’s coordinated saturation bombing strategy, if the goal is to maximize the total best-guess probability of the set of scenarios covered by at least one solution, this means crafting and posting diverse solutions which handle as wide a diversity of conjunctions of pessimistic assumptions as possible. This would be helped by having a list of pessimistic assumptions.
(It also may be helped by having a reasonable source of probabilities of scenarios, such as HPMOR predictions on PredictionBook. Also: in an adversarial context, the truth of pessimistic assumptions is correlated.)
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort has made advance preparations which will thwart every potential plan of Harry’s based on favorable tactical features or potential features of the situation which might reasonably be obvious to him. These include Harry’s access to his wand, the Death Eaters’ lack of armor enchantments or prepared shields, the destructive magic resonance, the Time-Turner, Harry’s other possessions, Harry’s glasses, the London portkey, a concealed Patronus from Hermione’s revival, or Hermione’s potential purposeful assistance. Any attempt to use these things will fail at least once and and will, absent an appropriate counter-strategy, immediately trigger lethal force against Harry.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort wants Harry to defeat him on this occasion. To get the best ending, Harry must defeat Voldemort, and then, before leaving the graveyard, identify a benefit that Voldemort gains by losing and deny him that benefit.
Pessimistic assumption: An intended solution involves, as a side-effect, Harry suffering a mortal affliction such as Transfiguration sickness or radiation poisoning, and is otherwise highly constrained. The proposed solution is close to this intended solution, and to match the other constraints, it must either include Harry suffering such an affliction with a plan to recover from it, or subject Harry to conditions where he would normally suffer such an affliction except that he has taken unusual measures to prevent it.
(This is one reading of the proviso, “evade immediate death”.)
Pessimistic assumption LV has been planning exactly this conversation for months and has thought of every possible plan of action that he could do. He has Harry level intelligence. All viable solutions must therefore use information LV does not have access to, which does not include the fact that Harry is Tom Riddle. Asking for power he knows not is trying to patch this minor hole.
Pessimistic assumption: The effect of the Unbreakable Vow depends crucially on the order in which Harry lets himself become aware of arguments about its logical consequences.
Pessimistic assumption: Any plan which causes the occurrence of the vignette from Ch. 1 does not lead to the best ending. (For example, one reading of phenomena in Ch. 89 is that that Harry is in a time loop, and the vignette may be associated with the path that leads to a reset of the loop.)
Pessimistic assumption LV knows that Harry can do partial transfiguration. LV has put up anti- apparition, anti- time turning and anti-transfiguration wards.
Less probable Pessimistic assumption these wards do not count as LV’s magic once laid and will not resonate with Harry, meaning they will stay active. Alternatively, a death eater has laid them on previously understood instructions.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort can reliably give orders to Death Eaters within line-of-sight, and Death Eaters can cast several important spells, without any visible sign or sound.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort wants Harry to reveal important information as a side effect of using his wand. To get the best ending, Harry must identify what information this would be, and prevent Voldemort from acquiring this information.
Pessimistic assumption: Neither partial Transfiguration nor extremely fast Transfiguration (using extremely small volumes) circumvent the limits on Transfiguring air.
Pessimistic assumption: Harry’s wand is not already touching a suitable object for Transfiguration. Neither partial Transfiguration nor extremely fast Transfiguration of extremely small volumes lift the restriction against Transfiguring air, dust specks or surface films would need to be specifically seen, the tip of the wand is not touching his skin, and the definition of “touching the wand” starts at the boundary of the wand material.
Pessimistic assumption: Free Transfiguration doesn’t work like a superpower from Worm: it does not grant sensory feedback about the object being Transfigured, even if it does interpret the caster’s idea of the target.
Pessimistic assumption: At least in the limit of unusually thin and long objects, Transfiguration time actually scales as the product of the shortest local dimension with the square of the longest local dimension of the target, rather than the volume. Harry has not detected this because he was always Transfiguring volumes or areas, and McGonagall was mistaken.
In Azkaban is stated that Harry transfiguration of a thin cylindrical layer from the wall is fast because its volume is small. This seems to contradict your assumption.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort, and some of the Death Eaters, have witnessed combat uses of the time-skewed Transfiguration featuring in Chapter 104. They will have appropriate reflexes to counter any attacks by partial Transfiguration which they could have countered if the attacks had been made using time-skewed Transfiguration.
Pessimistic assumption: Plans which depend on the use of partial Transfiguration, or Transfiguration of volumes small enough to complete at timescales smaller than that of mean free paths in air (order of 160 picoseconds?), to circumvent the limitation on Transfiguring air, will only qualify as valid if they contain an experimental test of the ability to Transfigure air, together with a backup plan which is among the best available in case it is not possible to Transfigure air.
Pessimistic assumption: Plans which depend on Transfiguring antimatter will only qualify as valid if they contain an experimental test of the ability to Transfigure antimatter, together with a backup plan which is among the best available in case it is not possible to Transfigure antimatter.
Pessimistic assumption: There are more than two endings. A solution meeting the stated criteria is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the least sad ending.
If a viable solution is posted [...] the story will continue to Ch. 121.
Otherwise you will get a shorter and sadder ending.
Note that the referent of “Ch. 121” is not necessarily fixed in advance.
Counterargument: “I expect that the collective effect of ‘everyone with more urgent life issues stays out of the effort’ shifts the probabilities very little” suggests that reasonable prior odds of getting each ending are all close to 0 or 1, so any possible hidden difficulty thresholds are either very high or very low.
Semi-pessimistic assumption: Harry is in the Mirror, which has staged this conflict (perhaps on favorable terms) because it’s stuck on the problem of figuring out what Tom Riddle’s ideal world is.
Pessimistic Assumptions Thread
– Ch. 15
– Ch. 63
– Ch. 94
– Ch. 103
Recalling finewbs’s coordinated saturation bombing strategy, if the goal is to maximize the total best-guess probability of the set of scenarios covered by at least one solution, this means crafting and posting diverse solutions which handle as wide a diversity of conjunctions of pessimistic assumptions as possible. This would be helped by having a list of pessimistic assumptions.
(It also may be helped by having a reasonable source of probabilities of scenarios, such as HPMOR predictions on PredictionBook. Also: in an adversarial context, the truth of pessimistic assumptions is correlated.)
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort has made advance preparations which will thwart every potential plan of Harry’s based on favorable tactical features or potential features of the situation which might reasonably be obvious to him. These include Harry’s access to his wand, the Death Eaters’ lack of armor enchantments or prepared shields, the destructive magic resonance, the Time-Turner, Harry’s other possessions, Harry’s glasses, the London portkey, a concealed Patronus from Hermione’s revival, or Hermione’s potential purposeful assistance. Any attempt to use these things will fail at least once and and will, absent an appropriate counter-strategy, immediately trigger lethal force against Harry.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort wants Harry to defeat him on this occasion. To get the best ending, Harry must defeat Voldemort, and then, before leaving the graveyard, identify a benefit that Voldemort gains by losing and deny him that benefit.
Pessimistic assumption: An intended solution involves, as a side-effect, Harry suffering a mortal affliction such as Transfiguration sickness or radiation poisoning, and is otherwise highly constrained. The proposed solution is close to this intended solution, and to match the other constraints, it must either include Harry suffering such an affliction with a plan to recover from it, or subject Harry to conditions where he would normally suffer such an affliction except that he has taken unusual measures to prevent it.
(This is one reading of the proviso, “evade immediate death”.)
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort has reasonable cause to be confident that his Horcrux network will not be affected by Harry’s death.
Pessimistic assumption LV has been planning exactly this conversation for months and has thought of every possible plan of action that he could do. He has Harry level intelligence. All viable solutions must therefore use information LV does not have access to, which does not include the fact that Harry is Tom Riddle. Asking for power he knows not is trying to patch this minor hole.
Pessimistic assumption: The effect of the Unbreakable Vow depends crucially on the order in which Harry lets himself become aware of arguments about its logical consequences.
And not only Harry must not interrupt the game, he must prevent everyone else who do not know he’s Time-Turned from doing it.
Pessimistic assumption: Any plan which causes the occurrence of the vignette from Ch. 1 does not lead to the best ending. (For example, one reading of phenomena in Ch. 89 is that that Harry is in a time loop, and the vignette may be associated with the path that leads to a reset of the loop.)
Pessimistic assumption LV knows that Harry can do partial transfiguration. LV has put up anti- apparition, anti- time turning and anti-transfiguration wards.
Less probable Pessimistic assumption these wards do not count as LV’s magic once laid and will not resonate with Harry, meaning they will stay active. Alternatively, a death eater has laid them on previously understood instructions.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort can reliably give orders to Death Eaters within line-of-sight, and Death Eaters can cast several important spells, without any visible sign or sound.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort wants Harry to reveal important information as a side effect of using his wand. To get the best ending, Harry must identify what information this would be, and prevent Voldemort from acquiring this information.
Pessimistic assumption: Hermione, once wakened, despite acting normal, will be under Voldemort’s control.
(somewhat shaky) Pessimistic Assumption
Voldemort can use a Time-Turner, too, and he will send himself a message from the future to win.
Concerning Transfiguration:
Pessimistic assumption: Neither partial Transfiguration nor extremely fast Transfiguration (using extremely small volumes) circumvent the limits on Transfiguring air.
Pessimistic assumption: Harry’s wand is not already touching a suitable object for Transfiguration. Neither partial Transfiguration nor extremely fast Transfiguration of extremely small volumes lift the restriction against Transfiguring air, dust specks or surface films would need to be specifically seen, the tip of the wand is not touching his skin, and the definition of “touching the wand” starts at the boundary of the wand material.
Pessimistic assumption: Free Transfiguration doesn’t work like a superpower from Worm: it does not grant sensory feedback about the object being Transfigured, even if it does interpret the caster’s idea of the target.
Pessimistic assumption: At least in the limit of unusually thin and long objects, Transfiguration time actually scales as the product of the shortest local dimension with the square of the longest local dimension of the target, rather than the volume. Harry has not detected this because he was always Transfiguring volumes or areas, and McGonagall was mistaken.
In Azkaban is stated that Harry transfiguration of a thin cylindrical layer from the wall is fast because its volume is small. This seems to contradict your assumption.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort, and some of the Death Eaters, have witnessed combat uses of the time-skewed Transfiguration featuring in Chapter 104. They will have appropriate reflexes to counter any attacks by partial Transfiguration which they could have countered if the attacks had been made using time-skewed Transfiguration.
Pessimistic assumption: It is not possible to Transfigure antimatter.
Pessimistic assumption: Plans which depend on the use of partial Transfiguration, or Transfiguration of volumes small enough to complete at timescales smaller than that of mean free paths in air (order of 160 picoseconds?), to circumvent the limitation on Transfiguring air, will only qualify as valid if they contain an experimental test of the ability to Transfigure air, together with a backup plan which is among the best available in case it is not possible to Transfigure air.
Pessimistic assumption: Plans which depend on Transfiguring antimatter will only qualify as valid if they contain an experimental test of the ability to Transfigure antimatter, together with a backup plan which is among the best available in case it is not possible to Transfigure antimatter.
Pessimistic assumption: There are more than two endings. A solution meeting the stated criteria is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the least sad ending.
Note that the referent of “Ch. 121” is not necessarily fixed in advance.
Counterargument: “I expect that the collective effect of ‘everyone with more urgent life issues stays out of the effort’ shifts the probabilities very little” suggests that reasonable prior odds of getting each ending are all close to 0 or 1, so any possible hidden difficulty thresholds are either very high or very low.
Counterargument: The challenge in Three Worlds Collide only had two endings.
Counterargument: A third ending would have taken additional writing effort, to no immediately obvious didactic purpose.
A necessary condition for a third ending might involve a solution that purposefully violates the criteria in some respect.
Semi-pessimistic assumption: Harry is in the Mirror, which has staged this conflict (perhaps on favorable terms) because it’s stuck on the problem of figuring out what Tom Riddle’s ideal world is.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort evaded the Mirror, and is watching every trick Harry’s coming up with to use against his reflection.
Pessimistic assumption Voldemort should not be killed, since without him it will never be known if the Prophecy came true.