Convention(s) for realtime vs. t+1

[Tommy]

Hi all,

While I was always a huge proponent of rt over time+1, I find that the current situation is a bit of a mess. There are quite a few situations where I am not sure whether a time somewhere is realtime or not, with different sweepers using different notation. It would be awesome if we agreed on a set of conventions that made that clear in every circumstance.

For example, it is pretty much clear that we do not want to mess up what a sub50 or a sub40 is, for instance. However, we could define subr<n>:=sub<n+1>.

Similarly, we could add a suffix to scores like so:
- 13.74 (14) becomes 13.74r or 14.74t.
- This looks awesomely like the suffixes C has to specify the type of a numeric literal.
- The suffix can be omitted if clear from context. That means that sweepers can just assume that context is always clear, and go on like always anyway, if they want to.
- However, should the context not be clear, "t or r?" becomes a short and non-verbose question that can be answered with a single letter.
- If this would make it into arbiter's IRC clipboard feature, I would no longer keep forgetting what that actually outputs.

Or am I the only one who is that confused at the moment?

[EWQMinesweeper]

i do not intend to change the way i post my games. a much easier convention would be that people posted at least time, 3bv and 3bvs. or if people bothered remembering who uses rt and who doesn't. it's not like people constantly switch back and forth. as far as i'm concerned i automatically assume that people post rt and that people know i post rt+1.

[qqwref]

I would like for the default convention to be that integer times are time+1 (the traditional winmine timing, so a 49 in 2012 is roughly equivalent to a 49 in 1992) and decimal times are realtime (the actual exact timing). To me these both fill a clear niche and thus have a clear reason to exist, whereas integer time and decimal time+1 are, as far as I know, only used for personal reasons.

If integer time+1 is too confusing people can just use decimal time exclusively, and talk about a 49.xx or whatever if they don't know the decimal part. A lot of cubers do exactly this.

I do like the r/t idea when it isn't obvious which is being used, but I doubt many people will follow it The number of people in the community who even read the forum is very small, and I know many of them have no reason to use that idea.