throughline-archtics

"WHY"

Long-horizon multi-agent RL evaluation defaults to gridworlds and Atari. Those are not the archetypes the appliance-layer thesis is graded against. The observable large-venue ticketing and revenue-management archetype — perishable inventory across a multi-event calendar, dynamic pricing across multiple price tiers, multi-segment demand under elasticity, and a long-horizon lifetime-value state machine on top of all of it — is one of the cleanest pressure tests in the public economy for the four pieces an env protocol owes to a runner: rich state, long credit-assignment horizon, sparse terminal reward against a dense process-conformance signal, and a non-trivial falsifier the env author can pre-register.

throughline-archtics is the first env past trivial Echo that exercises the throughline protocol under that load. It is the conformance proof that the protocol survives a real archetype without amendment.

"WHAT"

The state space is an inventory grid over events times tiers, plus a three-segment fan model (premium, mid, value) with per-segment price elasticity and a lifetime-value state machine, plus a calendar, plus an RNG, plus a realized-yield tracker against forecast.

The action space is four extern-struct shapes in a 12-byte wire format: Price(event, tier, new_price) mutates the price for one tier on one event, Allocate(event, tier, qty) releases inventory into the saleable pool, Offer(segment, discount) issues a targeted offer against one segment, and RenewalTrigger(segment) advances the lifetime-value state machine for one segment. The 12-byte wire shape is what makes the env addressable from a BEAM runner without serialisation overhead on the hot path.

The reward decomposes across the three throughline channels. The process channel scores rule conformance against floor, ceiling, and capacity constraints — an action that violates the price floor or oversells capacity returns a process-channel penalty without rolling back the env. The outcome channel is sparse and terminal: realized yield versus forecast, clamped to [-1, 2] so a 2x-forecast cap protects the credit-assignment signal from a single lucky run. The judge channel is nil for v0.0.1; the env conforms to the protocol's nil-allowed contract on that channel.

Two claims are pre-registered through the claims() callback. The first is archtics-ltv-renewal-monotonicity — the claim that a RenewalTrigger on a segment with the LTV machine in a renewable state never decreases the segment's expected future yield versus the no-renewal counterfactual under matched RNG. The second is archtics-segment-elasticity-stationarity — the claim that the per-segment elasticity coefficient is stationary across an episode under no offer perturbation. Both claims carry stax-experiment register IDs and are refuted if the runtime trace contradicts the registered hypothesis on any seed.

"MILESTONES"

• 2026-06-02 · v0.0.1 · tested. First env conforming to the throughline protocol past trivial Echo. State, action, reward, and claims surfaces wired against the contract. 18/18 unit tests pass on Zig 0.16.0 with zero memory leaks under the test allocator. Two falsifier claims declared via claims() and registered in stax-experiment. Confirms the throughline protocol survives the large-venue revenue-management archetype without amendment.

"DEPENDENCIES"

• throughline. The env protocol this env conforms to. The Zig contract layer is the only build-time dependency past the standard library.
• Zig 0.16 standard library.

"ADAPTER TARGETS"

• A BEAM runner against the throughline behaviours (Env, RewardBreakdown, Falsifier, Claim). The runner is the place a training loop attaches; this env exposes the surface the runner contracts against.

"RELATED CANON"

• The Mercantile Thesis. The appliance-layer claim this env instantiates against an observable archetype.

"RELATED WORKSHOP"

The v0.0.1 to v0.0.2 path is the judge-channel reference binding plus the first training-loop adapter against the BEAM runner. Workshop entry forthcoming on that ship.

"LIMITS"

Pre-1.0 substrate, named honestly.

• Single-archetype env. This is the large-venue ticketing and revenue-management archetype. It is not a generic dynamic-pricing harness; the constraints, segments, and LTV machine are shaped to the archetype.
• Judge channel nil. v0.0.1 returns nil on the judge channel per the protocol's nil-allowed contract. The judge binding is gated on the throughline v0.0.2 judge reference impl.
• Synthetic demand model. The three-segment elasticity model and the LTV state machine are designed against observable archetype-level dynamics, not calibrated against a private dataset. Calibration against real archetype telemetry is future revision and is gated on a public-data calibration source.
• No multi-event scheduling reward shaping. v0.0.1 rewards realized yield against forecast at the calendar level; per-event reward shaping is deferred.
• Single-runner contract. Multi-runner concurrent stepping against shared inventory state is the BEAM runtime's concern, not the env's; this env contracts single-runner steps.
• Zig 0.16 ceiling. Standard-library API churn each release. The repo pins 0.16.0.

"SOURCE"

• AGPL-3.0-or-later. This substrate page is the canonical public surface; the source mirror is gated by current posture and not advertised as publicly reachable.

"CITATION"

@software{collins_throughline_archtics_2026,
  author       = {Collins, Sean},
  title        = {{throughline-archtics: Long-Horizon Revenue-Management Env for the throughline Protocol}},
  version      = {v0.0.1},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {6},
  url          = {https://sunlitmoon.online/substrate/throughline-archtics.html},
  note         = {AGPL-3.0-or-later. Substrate page: sunlitmoon.online/substrate/throughline-archtics.}
}