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Exedra

In a Greek palaestra the exedra was the recessed room off the colonnade, fitted with stone benches, where trainers and philosophers sat and talked with students. Vitruvius put it in his plan of the building: seats "in which philosophers, rhetoricians, and others who delight in study may sit and converse." It is the room you learn in before you go out on the sand.

Palaestra is the court. Exedra is the room outside it.

Palaestra is a live venue where you run a data center at the grid interface for a simulated day and are scored against a certified optimal line. Exedra is the public companion: enough of the platform, in the open, that you can build a scenario of your own, play it, test it, and submit it.

What you can do here

You can clone this repository, compile a scenario from public grid data, run it against the same engine the venue runs, check it against the same acceptance gate the venue uses, and open a pull request. You need a text editor and public data. You do not need an account, a database, a cloud provider, or a key.

Two scenarios ship with it: First Shift, the six-turn coached tutorial, and Curtailment Order, the sixteen-hour day compiled from the NREL RTS-GMLC reliability testbed.

One thing not to do: the engine, the scoring function, the schema, and the gate are copied in from the platform, so a change to any of them is made upstream rather than here. Hydration explains why, and what to send instead.

Status

These pages are ahead of the repository. They describe Exedra as designed. The code arrives by export from the platform, and this table says what is actually in the tree.

Part	State
Goals and architecture	Written
Engine, scoring, schema	Not yet exported
Acceptance gate and optimizer	Not yet exported
First Shift and Curtailment Order	Not yet exported
Local runner	Not yet built
Contribution tutorials and prompts	Not yet written

Start here

Page	What it answers
Goals	Why this room exists and who it is for
The Venue	What Palaestra is, and the thesis underneath it
Where This Is Going	What is committed, what is one decision away, and four inventions offered for argument
Architecture	How the platform is built and why it splits where it does
The Competitor Contract	The interface every player and every agent speaks
The Engine	The complete rules, and the list of what is not modeled
The Scenario Pack	The file you are actually writing
Scoring and Stars	The two metrics, their denominators, and where the maximum comes from
What Exedra Withholds	What is not here, and why
Hydration	How this repository is generated, and why you never edit the engine here
Security Review	For a security reviewer: hosts, sign-in, sessions, authorization, secrets, logging
Privacy Review	For a data-protection reviewer: data held, retention, sub-processors, rights

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Palaestra is live at palaestra.thrivetech.ai. Playing a scenario is the fastest way to understand what you would be building.