---
type: analysis
title: "Pokémon TCG AI Battle - 2026-08-14 Architecture and Handoff Audit"
description: "Cross-check of the August 14 handoff, live source tree, Antigravity provenance, implementation gates, and preserved future architecture."
tags: [pokemon-tcg, architecture, handoff, provenance, antigravity, ropend, moe, epistemology]
timestamp: "2026-08-15T16:52:30-03:00"
---

# Pokémon TCG AI Battle - 2026-08-14 Architecture and Handoff Audit

## Purpose and source order

This page records the August 14 architectural review. It is an additive audit, not a pruning pass. Prospective material such as multidimensional RoPE, MoE routing, vehicle drafting, Apex mode, and later research phases remains documented below even when the live source tree does not implement it.

For implementation claims, the order of authority used here is:

1. live source code and its executable artifacts;
2. current repository handoff and project documents;
3. inspectable training, tournament, database and dataset artifacts;
4. Antigravity explorer reports and transcripts, labeled as provenance;
5. older Wikifita pages and historical assumptions.

## What the live source tree implements

The current policy implementation is still the entity/action Transformer family in `rl/policy_mlx.py` and `rl/policy_infer_torch.py`, trained by `scripts/bc/bc_train_mlx.py`. The observed contract is:

| Area | Observed August 14 state |
|---|---|
| Model width | `d_model=128`, four attention heads, monolithic FFN width 512 |
| Recurrent workspace | Scratch registers, learned initialization, `memory_in` and `memory_out`; the active count varies by configuration and run |
| Supervision | Policy/action loss plus `aux_ko`, `aux_prize_delta`, `aux_terminal` and `aux_return` heads |
| Temporal training | TBPTT with per-episode and per-side memory isolation in the trainer |
| Precision | The current PyTorch inference contract validates FP32 tensors; historical FP16 artifacts remain in the repository for lineage and comparison |
| Position handling | Existing token types, scalar/meta features and explicit option source/target gathers; no explicit RoPE implementation was found |
| Future modules | No tracked `rl/ropend`, `rl/moe`, `rl/policy_moe_torch.py`, `rl/policy_moe_mlx.py` or `rl/deck/vehicle_draft.py` implementation was found in the current tree |

The last row is an absence observation, not a deletion request. The blueprints and tests remain part of the project's future-phase record.

## What the August 14 documents specify

The current repository handoff (`AGENTS.md`, `PROJECT.md`, `TEST_INFRA.md`, `GEMINI.md`, `docs/technical_handoff_rfc.md` and `docs/architecture/`) defines a larger execution plan:

- 4D RoPEND over match step, meta-epoch, urgency clock and inferred Elo;
- four-expert Top-2 MoE with load-balancing supervision;
- 60-card vehicle draft context;
- strict FP32 contracts and a later Apex runtime phase;
- an elite dataset and relational parity work;
- mathematical monograph and Wikifita synchronization tracks.

These are current design and execution-plan claims. They are not evidence that the corresponding modules have already landed in the source tree. The August 14 milestone ledgers confirm this distinction: M1 is in implementation with its gate pending, M2 is still in technical survey, and M3 has explorer work but no final gate.

## Antigravity provenance cross-check

The Antigravity transcripts were inspected through their local brain records. The repository copies under `.agents/` are the durable, reviewable handoffs; the transcript UUIDs identify provenance and do not themselves prove implementation.

| Provenance record | Repository handoff or mirror | Status observed |
|---|---|---|
| Main orchestration `9189fa2e-93c2-4a04-9bf0-6d090880de27` | `AGENTS.md`, `PROJECT.md`, `TEST_INFRA.md`, RFC and generated survey artifacts | Handoff and blueprint synthesis |
| M1 orchestration `9a189410-43b1-4cdc-bc2a-7a942180e59c` | `.agents/sub_orch_m1/` | Explorers complete; worker and gate pending |
| M1 RoPEND explorer `607511a6-cff5-4500-bc83-612199d23b85` | `.agents/m1_exp_ropend/handoff.md` | Mathematical/operator blueprint complete; implementation absent |
| M1 contract and MoE explorers | `.agents/m1_exp_contract/handoff.md`, `.agents/m1_exp_moe/handoff.md` | Blueprint handoffs complete; implementation gate pending |
| M2 orchestration `f5143692-4dba-4e8a-aa34-f7465d296f9b` | `.agents/sub_orch_m2/` | Technical survey still in progress; no purge or elite rebuild executed |
| M2 DB explorer `85613988-6d11-4bc9-9fac-20d973ad499b` | `.agents/explorer_m2_db/` | Dispatch initialized, but no completed repository handoff was present |
| M2 dataset explorer `d2204035-8f25-4c8e-8e7b-dde82ad0dccb` | `.agents/explorer_m2_dataset/` | Progress claims audit work, but no completed handoff file was present |
| M2 oracle explorer `4f2002e7-7972-4adb-a21f-95806599d6c4` | `.agents/explorer_m2_oracle/handoff.md` | Oracle report complete; tests reported passing |
| M3 orchestration `4877bc7d-bfc2-44d3-bc55-1a9dd628ba39` | `.agents/sub_orch_m3/` | Mathematical explorer reports exist; gate remains in progress |

The M2 survey handoff is therefore useful evidence of what Antigravity measured and proposed, but its claims about a completed purge, zero foreign-key errors or a completed elite rebuild are not current implementation facts. The live database audit is recorded separately in [[pokemon_tcg_aug14_data_etl_database_audit]].

## Preserved future research boundary

The following remain valid future-phase records and must not be collapsed into the current implementation snapshot:

- RoPE-ND as a relational phase hypothesis over content carried by scratch and phase coordinates carried by rotations;
- structured MoE experts and vehicle-level context;
- causal tests separating recurrent persistence, future decodability, incremental sufficiency and causal mediation;
- Engram, multi-chain persistence, GRPO/RL alignment, world-model and later topology ideas;
- the mathematical PageRank-Abelian and J-space research programs.

The correct label for these items is `planned`, `hypothesis`, `open`, or `deferred` according to the originating document. They are not removed merely because the present model still uses the existing Transformer path.

## August 15 corpus expansion

This audit is now the entry point to a deeper documentation graph rather than the endpoint of the integration. [[pokemon_tcg_docs_corpus_provenance]] maps all 35 repository documents and their Git history; [[pokemon_tcg_neural_engine_tokenization]] records the as-built tensor contract; [[pokemon_tcg_ropend_moe_blueprint]] preserves the later RoPEND/MoE, vehicle-draft augmentation and Apex lineage; [[pokemon_tcg_data_augmentation_vehicle_draft]] gives that augmentation its own provenance contract; and [[pokemon_tcg_cross_harness_provenance]] records how Antigravity reports are used without replacing live source evidence.

The training failure that motivated the user's correction is documented in [[pokemon_tcg_stage3_training_failure_postmortem]]. It is part of the architecture boundary: adding prospective heads or future experts without a declared loss denominator, feature lineage and deployment-aligned validation can damage the shared representation while leaving in-pool metrics plausible.

## Current reconciliation after the handoff wave

The verified endpoint is project commit `20d7d0d` on `develop`, with 144
reachable commits. The post-blueprint commits `f988eb0`, `ea9317a`,
`dbf298a` and `14ec607` add planning, repository hygiene, ETL/idempotency and
operational-rule lineage, but they do not establish that RoPEND, MoE,
vehicle-draft or Apex runtime modules landed. A direct source and database
recheck therefore supersedes any unqualified handoff wording that sounds like
an acceptance result. The detailed contradiction ledger is in
[[pokemon_tcg_current_state_reconciliation]], which should be read alongside
this dated August 14 audit rather than replacing it.

## Cross-references

- [[pokemon_tcg_ai_battle]] - project hub and current reading map
- [[pokemon_tcg_agent_architecture]] - live model boundary
- [[pokemon_tcg_aug14_data_etl_database_audit]] - current database and ETL evidence
- [[pokemon_tcg_aug14_ablations_tournaments]] - ablation and tournament evidence
- [[pokemon_tcg_curriculum_stage_lineage]] - stage chronology and separated cross-harness cohorts
- [[pokemon_tcg_docs_corpus_provenance]] - complete docs inventory and Git timeline
- [[pokemon_tcg_stage3_training_failure_postmortem]] - Stage 3/4 loss and validation incident
- [[pokemon_tcg_neural_engine_tokenization]] - as-built model/tokenization reference
- [[pokemon_tcg_ropend_moe_blueprint]] - future architecture and data augmentation
- [[pokemon_tcg_cross_harness_provenance]] - Antigravity transcript/report provenance
- [[pokemon_tcg_handoff_acceptance_reconciliation]] - handoff source roles and acceptance-gate reconciliation
- [[pokemon_tcg_long_horizon_vision]] - preserved future architecture
- [[j_space_inference]] - evidence ladder for the J-space-like hypothesis
- [[pokemon_tcg_current_state_reconciliation]] - current source, database and milestone reconciliation