scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/2s93f8.md

## [MK][BST] Necessary Limitations on the Room of Requirement

* Author: u/eaglejarl *
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2s93f8/mkbst_necessary_limitations_on_the_room_of/
* Score: 8

* Created: 2015-01-13T05:31:49

### Post:

The Room of Requirement from Harry Potter is so utterly broken that there's no point even thinking about munchkining it, because it can apparently do anything except make food.

If you were going to write a story featuring the RoR, what restrictions would you put on it in order to make it munchkinable but not broken?  I feel like there should be a story in it, so give me some ideas.

There's a description of the RoR on [the HP wiki](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Room_of_Requirement) for reference.

### Comments:

> **u/CaptainLoggers** [+11]  (38 minutes later)
> 
> I've always been a sucker for lore about the Founders of Hogwarts, and the idea that the RoR was a creation of Helga's to genuinely assist the students who most needed her help, even when she was long gone is fun to me. 
> 
> So, rules, in no particular order: 
> 
> 1. Gamp's Laws, there are 5, but we only know one for sure (food). We know food can be duplicated, so I'm of the impression that when we say food cannot be created from scratch magically, that food that is created magically isn't nutritious or doesn't give energy, it cannot sustain a person. That is, there is something about food that cannot be created from magic, it possesses some essence that is unique. Taking from that, let's say the five things that magic cannot create a genuine copy of are:  Sentience, Love, Food, Precious Metal, and Magic. What does this mean? It means that while sentience can be preserved by magic, it cannot be created de novo. No creating genuine AI with the Room. Love is in and of itself a powerful substantive magical force in Harry Potter, and it's explicitly stated in the series to be impossible to create with magic (perhaps because genuine self giving love has a magic of its own). Food is as covered above. Perhaps there's some interaction between food and the magical force that allows wizards to regain magic, and diminishing returns prevents you from using magic to replenish magic. Precious metals is the one I'm least married to, with a handwave that states the Philosopher's Stone is okay because pure lead is the magical inverse of gold or something. And of course magic cannot create magic. We're not going to allow the RoR to make genuine phoenixes, wands from scratch, or potions that boost magical power, nor can we have the RoR making things from scratch which are magically powerful, like finished potions or artifacts. 
> 
> 2. The RoR may create something without an explicit description, but it has no sentience of its own. It creates as things are envisioned, drawing from the cleverness and inventiveness of the user, as well as the combined intellects of the Four Founders. It cannot, however, create something that the Four Founders together could not figure out how to make. 
> 
> 3. Physical limitations on size (no larger than 100 times than the floor it's on or something), atmosphere control (temperature, air content, gravity all close to Earth limits with some wiggle room), composition of room (always needs at least one circular wall and a ceiling and floor), and local time flow (always 1:1). 
> 
> 4. Nothing created inside by room can be taken out of it. 
> 
> 5. Only one person may request the room at a time, that person must be a student or faculty member of Hogwarts, and that person must genuinely need what they are requesting, as judged by a mental probe as if cast and analyzed by Helga Hufflepuff. 
> 
> EDIT: Keep in mind that the RoR (and Helga) don't make value judgements. The RoR can and will give something that is harmful, fatal, dangerous, or traitorous, at least existentially (but maybe not physically). Dumbledore needed a place to pee, Harry needed a place to work and train, Malfoy needed a place to betray the school and kill Dumbledore, Marietta needed to find the DA. The only value the RoR assesses is genuine need, expressed in thought.
> 
> I think that takes care of all of the obvious munchkinry, leaving room for interesting shenanigans, and represents something that actually has reason to exist and fits fairly well with canon and fanon descriptions of the room.

>> **u/eaglejarl** [+6]  (an hour later)
>> 
>> It's possible to [turn a teapot into a tortoise](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Teapot_to_tortoise) so magic apparently *can* create sentience, although perhaps not sapience.  The RoR might not be able to do it, of course -- it could be a safety measure that Helga put in place.

>>> **u/autowikiabot** [+2]  (an hour later)
>>> 
>>> #####	
>>> 
>>> ######	
>>> 
>>> ####	
>>>  [**Teapot to tortoise**](https://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Teapot%20to%20tortoise): [](#sfw) 
>>> 
>>> ---
>>> >
>>> >Third years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry were required to cast the spell during their final exams. If the spell was not performed perfectly, the tortoise may breathe steam, have spouts where the tail should be, or have the teapot's willow-pattern on their shell. Hermione Granger worried that her tortoise looked more like a turtle, much to everyone else's annoyance since many other students had their tortoises breathe steam and have other weird traits.  
>>> ^Interesting: [^Tortoise](https://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/tortoise) ^| [^Teapot ^to ^ferret](https://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/teapot to ferret) ^| [^Snail ^to ^Teapot](https://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/snail to teapot) ^| [^Teacup ^to ^tortoise](https://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/teacup to tortoise) 
>>> 
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>>>> **u/alexanderwales** [+7]  *Time flies like an arrow* (2 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> That's the sort of delightful whimsy that I really liked from the Harry Potter books, but that makes any attempt to codify How Magic Really Works doomed to failure.

>>>>> **u/None** [+4]  (3 hours later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> >How Magic Really Works
>>>>> 
>>>>> It reshapes territory to match maps.

>>>>>> **u/notentirelyrandom** [+4]  (17 hours later)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> That's just *words*, it doesn't *tell* you anything or let you make any new *predictions*, just says that magic lets you do things you imagine doing.

>>> **u/thakil** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>> 
>>> Also, you can eat a tortoise, so that seems to defy the exceptions (I suppose you can claim that the transfigured thing will revert back at some point, although there's no evidence in the text that this the case). Still, expecting HP canon to be consistent is an exercise in frustration, as the exceptions were clearly invented for plot reasons, with no considerations to how much sense they made in the story as it stood.

>>> **u/LordSwedish** [+1]  *Q Continuum* (6 days later)
>>> 
>>> Well we don't actually know if they become actual tortoises or if they become flesh golems that are given the shape and mannerisms of a tortoise. It would be difficult to tell the difference without extended study of the memory capabilities and ability to learn of the tortoise.
>>> 
>>> That said, if two transfigured tortoises are able to procreate I will acknowledge that this is one of the complete broken spells in the series.

>> **u/Nepene** [+3]  (13 hours later)
>> 
>> Sentience is relatively easy and common to create in Harry Potter. You have the room of thought with psychic brains in the Department of Mysteries, you have sentient monster books, you have the AI Weasley car, you have paintings, you have ghosts, you can transform non sentient objects to sentient.

>> **u/ancientcampus** [+3]  *juggling kittens* (13 hours later)
>> 
>> If I were writing Gamp's Laws, I'd expect them to be half-correct, half not-quite-right. For example, you might have "Law 1: No food. Law 2: No fuel", when in reality there's only one principle responsible for both phenomena.

>> **u/literal-hitler** [+3]  (19 hours later)
>> 
>> >Malfoy needed a place to betray the school and kill Dumbledore...
>> 
>> The vanishing cabinet was in the same instance of the RoR as Ravenclaw's diadem and Snape's textbook. The Room of Hidden Things. I was under the impression that Voldemort told Malfoy about the room of requirement, though Malfoy or even Voldemort may have only known about the Room of Hidden Things. The main flaw in that theory is that would mean that Voldemort told him how to get to the place where his horcrux was.

>> **u/okaycat** [+2]  (2 hours later)
>> 
>> With regards to food, it is stated that it is impossible to  conjure food magically.  However it is entirely possible to transfigure something inedible into food, replicate food, and summon food.  I don't think the room would have any trouble creating safe edible food for its students.
>> 
>> I'm more interested in whether the room could create sentient life.  In the books it seems like its possible.  Students regularly transfigure inanimate objects into animals.  Plus the weasley car gained sentience after being charmed so that is more evidence.  Even mirrors have some rudimentary speakinf skills. Magic makes the creation of nonhuman sentient life trivial.  Although I'm doubtful the room can create a post singularity intelligence trivially.

>>> **u/alexanderwales** [+7]  *Time flies like an arrow* (2 hours later)
>>> 
>>> It's best not to think about how magic works in Harry Potter too much, since it's clear that Rowling didn't think about it too much either.

>>> **u/Capt-POTATO** [+1]  *Chaos Legion* (a day later)
>>> 
>>> One small note, in the last book Neville states that the room cannot make food, and that that is the reason the passageway to the Hog's Head opened up.

>> **u/acakin** [+1]  (10 hours later)
>> 
>> This "Can't create food" thing baffles me because *what is food*, exactly? You can't create a steak... but can you create a cow that you then kill and eat? Would it then have nutritional value? What about fruit and vegetables? It you can create a flower, can you then create peas?

>> **u/RMcD94** [+1]  (12 hours later)
>> 
>> If love is part of the 5 rules I feel it hard to believe Voldemort would have the whole "he doesn't know it exists" spiel in the originals.

> **u/alexanderwales** [+5]  *Time flies like an arrow* (an hour later)
> 
> The fact that you can stick things into the storage locker portion of the Room of Requirement, have it transform into some other form (like a bathroom), and then open up the storage locker again seemed to imply that the room had a memory of some sort, and more than that, that it wasn't actually creating all that much from scratch. Here's how I would change the RoR:
> 
> 1. The Room can only create things that it's encountered before. If the book *Gamp's Antecedents of the Laws of Transfiguration* had passed through the Room before, then you would be able to find that book on the shelves of the Room's version of a library, but you can't expect the Room to go grabbing outside information. (This means that the Room naturally gets more useful as time goes on.)
> 2. Nothing that the Room creates can leave the Room. This means that you can't use it as a factory, and even if it can create food, that food won't keep you fed once you leave the Room. (HPMOR transfiguration concerns apply - you would probably want the Room to have limits on what it will create, have it pump in air from outside, etc.)
> 3. The Room can "remember" old configurations which can be called up at will.
> 4. There are some limits on how large you can make the Room.
> 
> Then you just assume that the Room is mostly composed of a powerful matter creation engine and a requirement judgement engine, and you're pretty much good to go. No, you can't use the Room as a time machine. No, it can't change the physical laws of the universe.
> 
> Depending on what you want your universe to be - whether it's canon Harry Potter or whether you just want to steal the concept and have it be a seemingly abandoned room at the University of Montreal - you can enact a few tweaks. The canon RoR has a bunch of tacked on magic powers that allow it to hide from detection and things like that, but I don't think that's central to the concept.
> 
> (The obvious hacks to the above model are left as an exercise to the reader.)
> 
> Edit: /u/eaglejarl, if you are planning to write a story about the Room of Requirement, I'd suggest that you just take the basic concept and pull it from Harry Potter canon - otherwise there are a ton of Harry Potter related bits of silliness that you need to deal with. Besides that, you get a lot more unique flavor that you can add in, since you can change the setting to be whatever you want. Set the Room in a palace during the Ottoman Empire, or at a corporate office building, and have it be a place of mystery to be explored rather than just another bit of magic tacked onto all the other exploitable bits of magic.

>> **u/xamueljones** [+3]  *My arch-enemy is entropy* (an hour later)
>> 
>> I notice that you didn't place any sapience restriction, so my first thought was to call on the Four Founders since they have passed through the Room before. (It seems like an AI-in-a-box problem where the Four Founder-AIs can't exist outside of the "box".)
>> 
>> For the following hacks, I assume the Rooms can conjure magical items that normally obey all of the laws of magic as long as they remain in the Room. Any indirect effects that is non-magical in nature will remain when leaving the Room and magical effects will disappear.
>> 
>> Conjure up healing potions or phoenix tears to make the Room into a hospital for near-death patients. Wait until all magical ingredients and magic has left the body of the patient and the patient can simply walk out. No magic potions that has a magical, or temporary, effect on you will be effective outside of the Room. But potions with a permanent non-magical effect will not have its aftereffects disappear.
>> 
>> There is also the opportunity to preform experiments with precious materials. For example, Snape can get as many rare potion ingredients the Room has seen before as he wants, and invent new potions through as many/wasteful experiments as necessary. Then he can walk out with a perfected potion recipe.

> **u/None** [+5]  (22 minutes later)
> 
> The usual genie problem where you have to ask the question just right because of the too-literal interpretation.

> **u/krakonfour** [+2]  (7 hours later)
> 
> Can you transmit data from within the room?

>> **u/Chosen_Pun** [+2]  *The Chosen Ones* (9 hours later)
>> 
>> IIRC, one end of the Vanishing Cabinet was stored in the Room. So, yes, though possibly only through particular magical methods, but at the very least that one for sure.
>> 
>> ...Can the Room access the Floo Network?

>>> **u/krakonfour** [+1]  (12 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I was just wondering about the utility of bringing a tianhe-2, miniturizing it, duplicating it a million times, then hooking them together to end up with something akin to the technological singularity in just one room.
>>> 
>>> The only benefit would be if your transmit and receive data.

>>>> **u/fljared** [+2]  *United Federation of Planets* (14 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Not Neccessarily. Any transcomputational problem could be solved by your supercomputer, and then the data dumped onto a portable hard drive you have and moved to the outside world by sneakernet. 
>>>> 
>>>> What is the first  72748204785828 digit prime?
>>>> 
>>>> Solving the protein folding problem or running thru the SET I@Home database is limited only by how long it takes to set up the RORputer and how long it takes to give it the raw data.
>>>> 
>>>> Heck, if you've got friendly AI solved, but it requires some arbitrarily processing power to run, run it in the RoR and then have the AI figure out a compressed version of itself.

> **u/ulyssessword** [+2]  (an hour later)
> 
> One change that would cover almost every possibility is making it respond to a person's true requirements, as opposed to their requests.  Do you really a room to house an army, or are you just abusing the RoR to try and get one?

>> **u/eaglejarl** [+3]  (an hour later)
>> 
>> But then "I need a room containing a Friendly AI which I can release onto the Internet in order to be sure that the first AI is Friendly" would be a valid request.

>>> **u/None** [+2]  (3 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I don't think you should be able to ask the Room of Requirement for something you not only can't engineer but *cannot actually specify*.  Of course, you could specify, "I need a software-implemented optimization process that minimizes my objectified regret with respect to my objective interests as detailed in Railton's *Moral Realism*" or "I need a piece of software implementing the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of my society".  I suppose those are close enough to having a map of your request in your head for the Room to be able to use it without solving your philosophical problems for you.

>>> **u/ulyssessword** [+2]  (7 hours later)
>>> 
>>> There would be no such thing as a "request".  The RoR would read your mind, see that you are focusing on the dangers of unFriendy AI, and give you a nice study room, possibly with an attached library and workshop.

> **u/ancientcampus** [+1]  *juggling kittens* (13 hours later)
> 
> I don't think they ever take anything "made" in the room outside the room. I always assumed holodeck rules apply. You can request a workshop, bring in the raw materials, and make something, then bring the finished product outside (which is what Draco did, fixing the vanishing cabinet).

> **u/duffmancd** [+1]  (18 hours later)
> 
> A lot of people seem to be listing things created by the room cannot be taken out of it. What then happens to the air? Either the founders built a large reservoir of air somewhere or people leaving the room suddenly find that their lungs are (mostly) empty of air, all the CO2 in them suddenly becomes very reactive atomic carbon and a whole lot of H2O in their body becomes H2.
> 
> Writing this I just realised that maybe the room simply draws air from outside. In any case you have to consider what exactly the room considers "made by the room" and what happens when real and virtual objects are mixed in some way. (As another example, can you mix real aluminium and virtual aluminium which when removed from the room becomes aluminium aerogel?)

> **u/E-o_o-3** [+1]  (19 hours later)
> 
> How about:
> 
> **1 - Any given Room of the Room of Requirement takes its initial form from roughly sewing together rooms and items which exist *somewhere* in the planet**. The room thus cannot create anything truly novel or directly implement creativity. Subsequent modifications to a given Room are retained, so you *can* create novel stuff *within* the rooms and leave them there, but you can't, say, visualize a unique painting and have it appear in the room unless you've specified the position of every drop of paint. (But you could say "I need to look at art" and you'll probably get a blended version of various art galleries...filled with commonplace paintings which have been duplicated often)
> 
> 2 - Because the Room tends to sew together stuff it finds in the world, you can't really ask it to duplicate a unique object. There have to be multiple very similar versions of the object in existence before the Room can create that object. So you can make wands, but you can't create The Elder Wand or Harry's particular wand, because it's unique. Similarly, you can't create "Crookshanks" because he's unique, but you can create cats in general. You can get specific books if there are multiple copies of the book in circulation to sew together, but you can't get unique one-of-a-kind books. You can only make philosopher's stone's if there are a bunch of them currently circulating, and so on. 
> 
> 3 - For the same sewing reason, no "Show me my dormitory from college". No "Show me Malfloy's Manor". You can get information in the sense of creating a library, but you can't get information from the room in the sense of spying on the arrangement of furniture in someone's house or figuring out someone's location. You don't get a fine level of control over how things are sewn together, You can specify if you want rooms in an approximate lay-out, but with very limited detail. 
> 
> 4 - The room only gives you what you *need* and not much more - that is, the room provides a satisficing solution to whatever you think you need, not an optimizing solution. You aren't automatically presented the best possible room from all room molds, just one that works.
> 
> 5 - The Room of Requirement is "lazy" and tends to re-use Rooms when possible.
> 
> 6 - No item generated within a Room may be removed from the Room of Requirement. Magical effects from generated items immediately halt upon leaving the room.
> 
> (Rules 1, 2, 3 all follow from the same "Sewing" property so obviously that is obviously the most munchkin-blocking. the rest are optional suggestions.)

> **u/Galap** [+1]  (a day later)
> 
> RoR can only create things you can imagine specifically. I.E. it can only create what you can think of yourself, both consciously and subconsiously. For example, you couldn't get it to make you a faster than light spaceship if you don't know details about how the FTL drive would work. Another important constraint implicit in this is that whatever it creates has to be physically possible (within the laws of physics/magic).
> 
> It's the ultimate fabricator, but it can't design things for you.

> **u/nerdguy1138** [+1]  *GNU Terry Pratchett* (2 days later)
> 
> I like the description in jerrway69 passageways (ffnet). ROR can grab anything within the school, potion, potion ingredients, books etc. No life from scratch.

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