On Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Voldemort = Quirrell = Hat and Cloak = Yermy Wibble

Methods- the account of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres' first year at Hogwarts- will resolve at least as much as the seven "canon" Harry Potter novels. This means that he will
1) realize Quirrell is Voldemort,
2) destroy all of his Horcruxes (Voyager, one in the core of Earth, one in the

Get all this kid stuff with Voldemort out of the way and start dealing with real issues like finding and rooting the Atlantean Magic Server and killing Death.

The word count for the first 85 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is 475,410. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is 76,944 words; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is 85,141 words; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is 107,253 words; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is 190,637 words. The total of these first four "canon" Harry Potter books is 459,975. Thus, MoR has more content than the first four canon books combined.

Hat and Cloak is Quirrell:
1) Hat and Cloak convinced Zabini to quintuple-cross Hermione, Draco, Harry, Dumbledore, and Quirrell, in order to tie the generals' scores. So, how did Quirrell benefit from this? At least 2-fold:
1a) Quirrell had the opportunity to give that speech about unity, trying to convince Magical Britain to willing take the Mark of a leader whom he's grooming to be a Dark Lord.
1b) Quirrell had a conversation with Zabini about Dumbledore being "evil", which Quirrell knew Harry was eavesdropping on. Harry thus distrusts Dumbledore, pushing him further under Quirrell's influence.
2) Hat and Cloak orchestrated the entire Hermione/Draco "duel" and the attempted murder trial.
2a) Quirrell recognizes that both Draco and Hermione are influences on Harry's life which interfere with his grooming of Harry, evidenced by their conversation when he tries to get Harry to pretend to defeat Voldemort. He succeeded in removing Draco from Harry's company, but failed to remove Hermione when Harry did something he probably couldn't have predicted.
2b) So, Quirrell tried to remove Hermione again (acting as a very out of character Quirrell, rather than Hat and Cloak), attempting to convince her that she should leave Hogwarts for her own safety. This also failed, but the consequences have not yet been seen.
2c) Hermione being sent to Azkaban further motivates Harry to depose magical Britian, setting himself as leader.

Scientific references list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgMO6eGi9VEhdEJLdmllQldjWTgwYld3SU1CLWpVWVE#gid=0

Story of Quirrellmort:
Tom Riddle makes his horcruxes, and becomes basically immortal. But he is still worried that Muggles will destroy the world with nuclear weapons. Kind of hard to resurrect yourself when there is no one left to perform the ritual, and no one to possess. So he decides to do something about the muggle problem.
He creates the character of Voldemort, who is over the top evil. Snake like face, cruel for cruelties sake, even tortures his own people etc. His goal is to been seen as the worst Dark Lord in history.
At some point, he sends some of his Death Eaters to capture that daughter of the Minister of Magic. Then he takes on the role of Hero X and publicly saves her, killing several of the Death Eaters. Then as Voldemort he kills every other person in Hero Xs house, so that no one will be left who might be able to figure out that he is a fake.
The goal is to convince all of Magical Britain to take agree to follow him, and take a Light Mark. Facing the worst Dark Lord of all time, they should jump at the chance to save themselves. And once he has control of all Magical Britain, it wouldn't be hard for him take over other Magical countries, have more people take the Mark, and eventually amass an army large enough to deal with the Muggles.
Only it doesn't work. Even faced with their own destruction, the Wizengamot won't follow him. Not that they come up with a plan to defeat Voldemort on their own, of course. They just expect Hero X to be a proper hero and do it all on his own, for no reason other than that he is a hero.
Meanwhile Voldemort has no such problems. Powerful Wizards fight for the chance to join him, despite how cruelly he treats them. And so he scraps the whole Hero X bit, and decides to just take over as Voldemort.



"And by similar logic: The words a wizard spoke, the wand movements, those weren't complicated enough of themselves to build up the spell effects from scratch - not the way that the three billion base pairs of human DNA actually were complicated enough to build a human body from scratch, not the way that computer programs took up thousands of bytes of data. So the words and wand movements were just triggers, levers pulled on some hidden and more complex machine. Buttons, not blueprints." - Chapter 25.

The question is, if this is so, why does casting a spell drain magical energy from the wizard? I thought it was clear (from the quote and from other observations on what wizards can do) that the actual energy to perform the tasks (that the spell was cast for) does not flow from the wizard himself/herself (but maybe I misinterpreted this). I figured it was more of a Jedi thing, where the wizard only guided ambient "energies" (sorry, I feel dirty saying that - hence the quotes) towards a specific task.

So, why the drain on the wizard if it is simply the equivalent of pushing a button (or otherwise activating machinery already in place)? The "magic gets exhausted" part feels like an artificially added limitation rather than a part of the universe (barring future explanation of course).

Hypothesis: Using magic isn't just making the right movements and noises and letting the "magic machine" do the work, you are also required to supply the energy for the spell yourself. It would function sort of like a 3d printer with no internal supply of resin. You would send the request for a particular "magic shape" in the form of wand movements and mouth-noises, as well as a supply of "raw" magic which is then converted into the magic effect.

For example, Harry would make a request for levitating an object by saying "Wingardium Leviosa" and swish-flicking his wand, and a portion of his magic is converted into the actual levitation effect by the machine.

The miscasting effects shown by Harry and Hermione's Bat Experiment could also indicate that there is not simply a predetermined list of spells that must be preformed just so, like buttons on a machine, but rather that each spell "request" contains specific information as to the nature of the requested magic effect. In this specific tested case, the ratio of the duration of certain vowel sounds almost certainly contains important information required for the spell to function properly.

An analogy can again be made to a 3d printer. A 3d printer can produce complicated shapes using a relatively small amount of information, because it already has most of the information it needs concerning how to build shapes. It just needs you to tell it what particular shape to build and to feed it material to build with. Not every set of parameters you feed a 3d printer will produce a useful shape, much like not every ratio of vowel sounds tested in the Bat Experiment produced a functional bat, but those sets of parameters that do produce useful shapes would be shared among the 3d printing community.
Much like how sets of mouth-noises and wand movements that produce useful effects are shared among wizards as "spells".

The results of the Bat Experiment:
"If you told Hermione to say "Oogely boogely" with the vowel durations in the ratio of 3 to 1 to 1, instead of the correct ratio of 3 to 1 to 2, you still got the bat but it wouldn't glow any more.
Not that belief was irrelevant here. Not that only the words and wand movements mattered.
If you gave Hermione completely incorrect information about what a spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.
If you didn't tell her at all what the spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.
If she knew in very vague terms what the spell was supposed to do, or she was only partially wrong, then the spell would work as originally described in the book, not the way she'd been told it should."

It appears that the thingy-that-makes-magic-work, henceforth referred to as a "Magic Printer", uses not only the mouth-noises and wand-movements as information, but also the caster's mental perception of what the spell is supposed to do, and then checks it against a list of predetermined spells. The Magic Printer takes a set of parameters and an intended effect, and produces the requested spell. "Oogely boogely" and the right wand movements are the correct parameters to produce a bat with glow, and the intended effect is a bat with glow, so a bat with glow is produced.

If the caster doesn't know exactly the right parameters but knows the effect OR knows the right parameters but not exactly the right effect, the Magic Printer checks the list of spells and attempts to produce the intended spell. A spellchecker for spells, if you will. If the caster knows the right requests but does not provide an intended effect or provides an incompatible intended effect, the spell is not cast, as the spellchecker can find no matches. A mispronounced "Oogely boogely" would be slightly incorrect parameters to produce a bat with glow, and the intended effect is a bat with glow, so the Magic Printer spellchecks the parameters and intended effect, substitutes the closest spell, and produces it. The same seems to occur if the correct parameters but an incorrect intended effect were supplied. A correctly pronounced "Oogely boogely" with no intended effect appears to not be close enough to any spell for spellchecking to produce a match, so no spell is produced. Also, some sets of parameters appear to be outside of the spellchecker's tolerances, and produce nonfunctional bats.

A flaw in this theory is that it does not totally explain how Hermione produced a bat that did not glow. Potential explanations include there being two preprogrammed versions of the "Oogely boogely" spell, one with glow and one without, or that Harry told Hermione that the bat wasn't supposed to glow AND just happened to change the right parameter to get rid of the glow.