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Equation 18 · Part 1 · Naive, Graph, and Agentic: A Systems Comparison of RAG Architectures

Symbol c_query

cquery(Q)=CindexQ+cmarginal.c_{\text{query}}(Q) = \frac{C_{\text{index}}}{Q} + c_{\text{marginal}}.
cqueryc_{\text{query}}

What this part means

cqc_query is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

Its job in the formula

cqc_query is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

The passage around this formula

This is the one family among the five whose defining engineering trade-off is temporal rather than architectural: cost is shifted from query time to index time. Writing CindexC_{\text{index}} for the one-time cost of building the graph and its community summaries, and cmarginalc_{\text{marginal}} for the cost of answering a single query against the finished structure, the amortised cost of a query workload of size Q against one graph is cquery(Q)=CindexQ+cmarginalc_{\text{query}}(Q) = \frac{C_{\text{index}}}{Q} + c_{\text{marginal}}. When Q is small — a corpus queried rarely, or one still being explored — CindexC_{\text{index}} dominates and the naive or hybrid architectures are cheaper by a wide margin, because they pay nothing until a query arrives. When Q is large against a stable…

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A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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