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Equation 9 · Part 6 · A History of How We Learned to Evaluate AI Agents

fraction

pass@k  =  Eproblems ⁣[ 1−(n−ck)(nk) ].\text{pass@}k \;=\; \mathbb{E}_{\text{problems}}\!\left[\,1 - \frac{\binom{n-c}{k}}{\binom{n}{k}}\,\right].
fraction

What this part means

Divide the expression above the line by the one below it.

Its job in the formula

The expression above the fraction bar is divided by the complete expression below it. The denominator must not be zero.

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: pass@k  =  Eproblems ⁣[ 1−(n−ck)(nk) ]\text{pass@}k \;=\; \mathbb{E}_{\text{problems}}\!\left[\,1 - \frac{\binom{n-c}{k}}{\binom{n}{k}}\,\right]. 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…

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Learn the underlying idea

A fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.

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Sources cited in the article section

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