Equation 3 · Part 1 · A History of How We Learned to Evaluate AI Agents
Symbol k
What this part means
the especially at small.
Its job in the formula
k is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
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Where the article explains it
That last detail forced a genuine statistical problem into agent-adjacent evaluation for the first time: naively estimating the chance that at least one of k sampled attempts succeeds, by drawing exactly k samples and checking, is a high-variance estimator, especially at small k .
The passage around this formula
That last detail forced a genuine statistical problem into agent-adjacent evaluation for the first time: naively estimating the chance that at least one of k sampled attempts succeeds, by drawing exactly k samples and checking, is a high-variance estimator, especially at small k . Chen and colleagues instead drew a larger fixed pool of n samples per problem, counted the number c that passed, and computed an unbiased estimate of the pass rate at budget k directly from that pool:
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