Ed Murphy wrote: > comex wrote: > >> Actions in Agora are generally ordered; unordered actions are accepted >> only when they cause no ambiguity because the order is unimportant to >> the rules. Assets are rule-defined entities and allowing the unordered >> transfers (before the amendment I proposed, which specifies a default >> order, takes effect) would cause unacceptable gamestate ambiguity. > > Consider this hypothetical contract: > > 1) Hue is a switch of this contract with values White (default) > and Black. > > 2) When a person announces something between 13:00:00 and 13:00:14 > UTC, this contract's Hue becomes White. > > 3) When a person announces something between 13:00:00 and 13:00:14 > UTC, this contract's Hue becomes White. > > Would this make it impossible to act for 14 seconds each day?
I'm assuming the last word of paragraph 3 should have been "Black." The internal states and mechanisms of contracts don't affect the broader game. As was pointed out, the transfer would have been effective had I said "I transfer all my crops to the IBA" (a Rule-defined action) instead of "I deposit all my crops in the IBA" (a contract-defined action). In this case, the only ambiguity is in the Hue of the hypothetical contract, not in the message that triggers its switch. Furthermore, the ambiguity in your thought experiment is caused by the text of the contract poorly specifying its internal mechanisms, whereas the "unordered actions" argument is properly talking about shorthand in a message itself that cannot be unambigously resolved into a well-ordered expanded form. Message ambiguity is a matter of clear vs. unclear synonyms. Contract ambiguity is an entirely different beast.
