Most research ideas don't start as a structured model — they start as a note, a forum post, or a strategy already written in something like TradingView's Pine Script. The "input hypothesis" stage of Maple's engine (see How Maple Works) is designed to be the on-ramp for those ideas: describe them in plain English or supported code, and have the system show what it understood before anything is tested.
Why this step matters
Rebuilding an idea by hand, field by field, is a real barrier between having a hypothesis and actually testing it — and a barrier is exactly what causes people to trust an idea on faith instead of evidence. Removing the retyping step is designed to help more ideas make it to a real test instead of staying a hunch.
Why review has to come before testing
Reading a strategy out of a paragraph of English, or a script written for a different platform, is an act of interpretation, not a lookup — and interpretation can be wrong. Maple is designed to show exactly what it understood, in plain language, before anything is tested, so a misreading gets caught by a person before it quietly becomes a misleading result. That's the same "evidence over hype" instinct behind the rest of Maple's philosophy, applied one step earlier — to the hypothesis itself, not just its results.
Why ambiguity should be disclosed, not guessed at
A described strategy can leave real gaps — no asset specified, an entry rule with no exit, logic that references something the system doesn't yet model (a custom indicator, a volatility-based stop). Maple is designed to treat a gap as something to ask about, not something to quietly assume an answer for. Producing a confident-looking result from an incompletely specified question isn't a shortcut worth taking.
Illustrative examples
A few short examples of the kind of plain-English or Pine Script description this stage is designed to read — illustrative of the intended capability, not a demonstration of a currently available product.
Plain English: EMA crossover
Go long when the 20 EMA crosses above the 50 EMA. Go short when the 20 EMA
crosses below the 50 EMA. Exit on opposite signal. Use a 3% stop loss.Plain English: RSI mean reversion
Buy when RSI(14) drops below 30. Sell when RSI(14) rises above 70.
Use a 5% stop loss.Pine Script: EMA crossover
strategy("EMA Cross", overlay=true)
fastEma = ta.ema(close, 9)
slowEma = ta.ema(close, 21)
if ta.crossover(fastEma, slowEma)
strategy.entry("Long", strategy.long)
if ta.crossunder(fastEma, slowEma)
strategy.close("Long")How this fits Maple's mission
Maple's mission is separating a real, repeatable edge from an idea that only looks good — and that discipline is designed to start before a single test is run, not after.