Equation 3 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Frontier AI Model Comparisons
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the harmonic mean of precision P and recall R . The harmonic mean, rather than the arithmetic mean, was the substantive choice: it penalizes a system that trades one quantity away for the other, so a system cannot inflate its score by returning everything (maximizing recall while destroying precision) or almost nothing (the reverse). That is a real methodological assumption — that both errors matter and neither should be free — and it is worth stating plainly because later single-number benchmarks inherited the habit of compression without always inheriting this discipline about what the compression should punish.
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