Equation 11 · Part 1 · A History of How We Learned to Evaluate AI Agents
Symbol n
What this part means
the number of samples.
Its job in the formula
n is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol n→Article meaning
Where the article explains it
The term inside the brackets is the probability that a random draw of k items from the n samples contains no passing solution, so one minus that quantity is the probability at least one does.
The passage around this formula
The term inside the brackets is the probability that a random draw of k items from the n samples contains no passing solution, so one minus that quantity is the probability at least one does. The point of writing the estimator this way, rather than simply sampling k times per problem, is to separate two things later agent benchmarks would have to separate again and again: how good a system is, and how much it was allowed to try. Every agent benchmark discussed below that reports a success rate is implicitly answering the question this estimator first made explicit — success at what sampling budget, counted how.
Learn the underlying idea
A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.
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Sources cited in the article section
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.