My proposal would simply make rules 5A and 5B more complete (without making them much more detailed) and much better organized. It wouldn’t require any programming changes.
The way you had it in your latest version, except with a slash in d/5 and inc/30 in the examples. The statement text itself does not need to mention this one way or the other, which your latest version already doesn’t.
As for how the MSA program should parse time control information, I’m sure Mike Nolan has already made that as flexible as possible. Presumably, any d or inc (with or without slash), followed by a number, at the end, is assumed to apply to all the controls, regardless of punctuation, unless there is also a d or inc somewhere in the middle, in which case the one in the middle would apply to all those before it, and the one at the end would apply to all the others. Etc etc etc. I doubt whether anybody could break Nolan’s parsing algorithm, except through deliberate and very brutal force.
That’s my whole point. There are different ways to unambiguously specify time controls, and codifying (as part of a RULE) a particular set of preferred punctuation is a bad idea.
5B2 has nothing specific to do with “sudden death time controls”. The requirement that advanced publicity needs to include time control including increment should be a 5A1. It should require that advanced publicity clearly describe the time control including delay or increment or lack thereof. It should not require that particular abbreviations be used. (Spelling out “Each player must make all moves in 30 minutes with no delay” should be acceptable).
I agree here. My proposed rewrite and reorganization of rules 5A and 5B fixes this issue. I also don’t like that “5B1. Delay and increment.” is a subsection of “5B. Sudden death time controls.” because time controls without sudden death can have delay or increment as well and my proposed rewrite and reorganization also fixes this issue.
Micah, my concern is that the gap-filling provisions for when–not if, but when–an organizer fails to specify an increment or delay (or lack thereof) must be retained. It is simply dirty pool to stick participants with d0 when the advance publicity says only G/x, and there are still plenty of folks who organized for many years before G/x without more (and with an understood d/y witha a y that varied as a function of x) became “Not OK”.
This error has occurred within the last decade in US Chess display ads for US Chess events in Chess Life. It is not a theoretical concern when even the rulemaking body has failed to get it right.
This is already covered by rule 5E2 which states: “If the organizer fails to specify an increment or delay time in the time control (which may be zero to indicate no increment or delay), the minimum recommended delay specified in rule 5E shall apply.”
“5B. Time control abbreviations.” should not be a rule. Those are simply the commonly used abbreviations at this time. What is the actual rule (what we require organizers to do) is to clearly state the time controls of the sections including increment/delay. Whether that’s done with prose or with commonly used shorthand should not be our business.
Beginning with the 5th edition, it has somehow become a mega-rule (or perhaps I should say meta-rule) that everything in the rulebook must be either a rule or a TD Tip. It is apparently not allowed to have an explanatory paragraph to smooth out details, unless the paragraph is labeled as a TD Tip.
This is unfortunate, but it’s not worth the bother to restructure the entire rulebook to accommodate non-rule, non-Tip explanatory passages. So let’s just allow a few “non-rules” to be numbered as rules. The harm, if any, caused by numbering a non-rule can be mitigated by renaming the rule. In this case it could be “5B. Suggested time control abbreviations” or “5B. Recommended time control abbreviations” or “5B. Commonly used time control abbreviations”.
That way we can all continue to benefit from the explanations (and the abbreviations – which have become so commonplace that they should be in the rulebook) while still understanding that 5B is, technically, a recommendation rather than a requirement.
The FIDE handbook is not cluttered with anything that is not a rule. Perhaps that is a good way to go. Get rid of tips etc and strip down to the rules. The FIDE arbiters handbook has some of the other items in it.
That is largely what we tried to do in the posting of the actual rules sections online.
I like this idea. There are other rules that already do this. Rule 5E for example is called “Recommended increment or delay.” I like keeping the explanations of time control abbreviations in the rulebook since it makes it clear how the rest of the rulebook refers to various time controls.