---
type: analysis
title: "Pokémon TCG — Curriculum Stage Lineage and Cohort Boundaries"
description: "Provenance-bound chronology of Curriculum V1 stages, training incidents, checkpoint transitions and tournament cohorts from the Antigravity reports and repository history."
tags: [pokemon-tcg, curriculum, stages, ablation, tournament, provenance, training, fp32, fp16, grpo]
timestamp: "2026-08-15T18:05:00-03:00"
---

# Pokémon TCG — Curriculum Stage Lineage and Cohort Boundaries

## Why this page exists

The project uses “Stage 1” through “Stage 5” for several related but
non-identical objects: training curricula, checkpoints, source filters,
tournament packages and future plans. A stage label is not a cohort key. This
page keeps the stage narrative attached to its source artifact, commit,
denominator and status so that the 871-game, 420-game, 3,600-game and later
teacher results are not silently merged.

## Stage lineage

| Stage or phase | Source-reported intent | Directly observed boundary | Status in the current reconciliation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stage 1 | Broad behavioral-cloning foundation over the available corpus | FP32 package in tournament 119: 60/420, 14.29%; an earlier 871-game round-robin record reports 28.47% | Historical checkpoint/cohort, not a current acceptance result |
| Stage 2 | Elo-filtered or more selective curriculum, described as Top 600 | FP32 package in tournament 120: 64/420, 15.24%; earlier round-robin record reports 28.93% | Historical checkpoint/cohort; filter semantics depend on the run artifact |
| Stage 3 | Top-100 elite curriculum and a continuation from Stage 2 | The run labeled one day loaded two dates, split validation inside the filtered pool, and changed the sparse auxiliary-loss reduction; tournament 121 records 58/420, 13.81% | Failure-analysis cohort; loss and validation contract not accepted as a clean baseline |
| Stage 4 | Loss-corrected or stabilized continuation, with a stronger vehicle effect | FP32 package in tournament 122: 72/420, 17.14%; Deck #633 reached 39/140, while Deck #251 reached 18/140 | Best aggregate member of the comparable 420-game cohort, still below the handoff target |
| Stage 5 | Top-25 “Apex” polishing before an RL transition | The August 12 architecture report calls it scheduled; no current source path or acceptance artifact proves a completed Stage 5 runtime | Planned/source-reported future phase |
| Post-BC direction | Offline GRPO, self-play, frozen teacher/world-model experiments and later MoE specialists | The long-horizon vision and August 13 blueprint describe the direction; no corresponding current runtime modules are tracked | Deferred research lineage |

The Stage 3 and Stage 4 labels must be read with
[[pokemon_tcg_stage3_training_failure_postmortem]]. The user-reported
catastrophic-forgetting interpretation is preserved as a causal hypothesis;
the code and logs establish a loss-scale and validation mismatch, not an
isolated gradient-attribution proof.

## Cohorts that must remain separate

| Cohort | Source and storage | Denominator and result | Why it is separate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full round-robin | SQLite tournament IDs 98–102 and `project_architecture_and_state.md` | 871 games per agent in the report; Stage 1 28.47%, Stage 2 28.93%, Stage 3 epochs 31/32 30.42%/30.19%, teacher 67.16% | Different opponent/deck configuration and lifecycle from the 420-game matrix |
| Benchmark sweep | SQLite tournament IDs 105–109 | 20-game benchmark; stages 1–4 from 14.17% to 14.72%, teacher 43.89% | Smaller evaluation and different sweep configuration |
| Principal FP32 matrix | SQLite tournament IDs 119–122 and `ablation_matrix_results.md` | 420 games per stage; 14.29%, 15.24%, 13.81%, 17.14% | Comparable Stage 1–4 matrix used by the empirical monograph |
| Cross-agent report | `tournament_analysis_2274.md` in the Antigravity brain | 3,600-game report with a Stage 4 peak of 27.5% in its own deck/opponent setup | Separate report and matchup construction; not the 420-game matrix |
| Teacher sweeps | SQLite tournament IDs 123–128 | 800-game and later rows, including 12.52%, 12.38%, 12.75%, 12.50%, then teacher 51.00% and 64.35% | Different teacher and reset/opponent conditions |
| Curriculum suite | August 6–7 ten-run suite | `(1d, 3d, 5d) × (1 epoch, 10 epochs) × (top-Elo OFF, ON)`, with per-run tournaments and a 45-pair peer round-robin | Validation and peer/public-agent observables are not the Stage 1–4 FP32 matrix |

The database currently preserves tournament summaries but only 1,760 local
match rows in the normalized `matches` table. It therefore does not prove
that every earlier tournament's underlying replay rows survived one continuous
database lifecycle. The reset and retention uncertainty is part of the result
provenance, not a footnote.

## Incident inside the lineage

The most important stage transition is not a score increase. It is the change
in the training contract around Stage 3:

1. the run was labeled as a one-day Top-100 curriculum but loaded two dates;
2. validation was drawn from the same filtered pool rather than a declared
   deployment-aligned holdout;
3. commit `0dec40f` changed the auxiliary reduction path by removing the
   valid-row division from the accumulated objective;
4. the next Stage 4 telemetry exposed training auxiliary values near 1,000
   beside validation values near 0.2–1.5;
5. the reported “dynamic mean” correction changed the scale again, while the
   strict-FP32 correction addressed a separate numerical failure.

The consequence is methodological: Stage 4's 17.14% cannot be cited as an
isolated proof that one loss fix improved the architecture. It is an observed
result under a changed objective, checkpoint lineage, precision contract,
vehicle mix and tournament cohort.

## Provenance chain

| Commit or artifact | Transition recorded | Evidence role |
|---|---|---|
| `a942373` (2026-08-03) | Removed the separate prospective sidecar, integrated auxiliary heads/meta features and moved the corpus to Parquet | Code change; establishes the post-sidecar baseline |
| `f90ac1e` (2026-08-11) | Added curriculum-v1 sweep orchestration, model/deck combinations and atomic Elo updates | Code change; orchestration surface |
| `86aa528` (2026-08-12) | Added Stage 3 tournament and Abelian-rating changes | Code/data change; not proof of a theorem |
| `0dec40f` (2026-08-12) | Changed the trainer's auxiliary reduction path | Code change; central to the Stage 3 incident |
| `d9c67a7` (2026-08-12) | Added the integrated monograph and nine manuscript chapters alongside training/tournament edits | Mixed code/document commit; requires claim separation |
| `9bc5021` (2026-08-12) | Stored Stage 1–3 FP32 archives | Artifact lineage; checkpoint existence only |
| `459f9d6` and `f697ce9` (2026-08-13) | Introduced the first Magnum Opus/RoPEND/MoE and stochastic-Elo blueprint layer | Future design lineage |
| `docs/empirical_ablation_monograph.md` | Formalized the 420-game matrix, validation/win-rate distinction and vehicle interpretation | Source monograph; cohort-bound synthesis |
| `ablation_matrix_results.md` | Reproduced the principal 420-game table in the Antigravity brain | Cross-harness report; cross-checked against SQLite |
| `project_architecture_and_state.md` | Recorded the 871-game narrative, Stage 3 anomaly and planned Stage 5 | Dated handoff; not a current runtime snapshot |

The full repository order is maintained in
[[pokemon_tcg_repository_timeline]], while the source-to-page mapping is in
[[pokemon_tcg_docs_corpus_provenance]].

## Reading rule for future experiments

Every new stage report should include:

```text
stage label / checkpoint or commit / source days / filter / objective reduction /
precision / deck set / opponent set / game count / reset boundary / artifact path
```

If one field is missing, the result remains a dated observation with an
explicit uncertainty rather than becoming a new baseline. This contract is
the minimum needed before comparing a future vehicle draft, GRPO run or MoE
specialist with the historical BC stages.

## Cross-references

- [[pokemon_tcg_aug14_ablations_tournaments]] — stored tournament ledger and denominator-separated results.
- [[pokemon_tcg_empirical_ablation_monograph]] — analytical reading of the principal matrix.
- [[pokemon_tcg_bc_curriculum_ablation]] — ten-run curriculum suite.
- [[pokemon_tcg_stage3_training_failure_postmortem]] — loss-scale and validation incident.
- [[pokemon_tcg_cross_harness_provenance]] — Antigravity report and transcript lineage.
- [[pokemon_tcg_ropend_moe_blueprint]] — future architecture that depends on repaired stage contracts.
- [[pokemon_tcg_long_horizon_vision]] — post-BC GRPO, self-play and MoE direction.
- [[pokemon_tcg_current_state_reconciliation]] — current code/database boundary.