← All parts of this equation

Equation 5 · Part 11 · Building a Custom Evaluation Suite for a Production Agent

Numerator: 2p(1-p)(z_α/2 + z_β)^2

n≈2 p(1−p) (zα/2+zβ)2δ2.n \approx \frac{2\,p(1-p)\,(z_{\alpha/2} + z_{\beta})^2}{\delta^2} .
2 p(1−p) (zα/2+zβ)22\,p(1-p)\,(z_{\alpha/2} + z_{\beta})^2

What this part means

The complete quantity above the fraction bar.

Its job in the formula

2p(1-p)(z_α/2 + z_β)^2 occurs above the fraction bar. The numerator is divided by the entire denominator below it.

The passage around this formula

Because a “pass” verdict is itself often a noisy measurement, not a fact, it is worth being explicit about how much noise a single run’s outcome carries before treating a change in the pass rate as real. If a task’s true pass rate is p under a baseline configuration and a candidate change is worth detecting only once it shifts that rate by at least δ\delta , the number of repeated trials needed per configuration to detect the shift reliably — at significance level α\alpha and statistical power 1-β\beta — is approximately n≈2 p(1−p) (zα/2+zβ)2δ2n \approx \frac{2\,p(1-p)\,(z_{\alpha/2} + z_{\beta})^2}{\delta^2} . Plugging in a fairly ordinary case — a baseline pass rate of 70 percent, a minimum shift worth caring about of 10 percentage points, a 5 percent…

Read this part in the article →

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.

Open the illustrated fractions: division written vertically guide →

Sources cited in the article section

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.