Standard TM Text format

My vote is:

  1. I still prefer: ---, but will accept letters if a majority rule.
  2. Prefer lowercase.
  3. Don’t really care much which letter. I guess uuu is distinctive (and stands for undefined, sounds good).

Good to get going yes.

  1. I vote for ---, no letters
  2. If letters (but I vote no letters), lower case
  3. If letters (but I vote no letters), uuu
  1. & 3. i was ok with ---, now i prefer uuu. but no hard feelings, just easier doubleclick selectability
  2. lowercase to make it more distinctive

I’m definitely in favor of solidifying soon, and I like the voting approach. I also don’t have any super strong takes here, just wanted to raise the point. I’m actually pretty undecided on uuu versus ---, and I’m tempted not to vote at all since I could see it either way. But I think my answers are:

  1. ---
  2. (voted no letters) lowercase
  3. (voted no letters) uuu

I found this thread late, unfortunately.
I personally use 1R<invalid state> internally for halt transitions, and I have a special placeholder syntax for undefined, closest being ---, with each of symbol, direction and state being able to be replaced with the placeholder character separately. I’d be fine making it _, but seems like it’s too late for that.
The “XXX” syntax is what I use in a few places, in some contexts denoting halting, in some contexts denoting a conflict / impossible state from given constraints. Probably not necessary to reflect this in an interchange format, I’m fine with denoting it as ‘arbitrary’.
(uppercase/lowercase doesn’t matter that much to me, but in my opinion lowercase looks slightly better. I don’t like other letters than ‘x’, though)

Summary:

  1. Prefer ---, but xxx is fine
  2. Slightly prefer lowercase for aesthetic reasons
  3. xxx only (or if not that, only one allowed string to not need complex checking in parsers)

It looks like we are in “almost” complete agreement. Unless @univerz wants to make a final argument for letters, I say that --- remain the indicator for undefined transitions.

i’m ok with ---, it has solid historical precedent for all of us and i didn’t think about changing it myself before discussing it on discord.

(and we can always revisit this decision if we get annoyed with copy-pasting not fully defined machines in later bbchallenge stages, when we will discuss them at an increasing frequency.)

1 Like

It seems like we have agreed on a format!

1RB---_0LC1LC_0RD0LB_1RA0RE_1RD1RZ it is!

I will update bbchallenge’s website soon with this spec.

Congrats to us on making a collaborative choice!

The new format is now live on the website: https://bbchallenge.org/1RB---_0LC1LC_0RD0LB_1RA0RE_1RD1RZ

1 Like