Equation 12 · Part 8 · Measuring AI Agent Reliability: What the Evidence Actually Supports
superscript
superscript
What this part means
A raised number can be a power. When it is a label or bound, it selects a case or the upper limit of a sum; the formula’s structure distinguishes these uses.
Its job in the formula
A raised mark can be a power or an index. Its position and the surrounding notation determine which.
Full expression→superscript→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Pass@k answers a specific question: given a budget of k independent attempts, what is the chance that at least one succeeds? That is the right question for a search-and-verify workflow, where a cheap checker can identify the one attempt that worked among several candidates. It is the wrong question for almost everything else an agent does, because most agentic tasks do not offer a free, cheap oracle that can pick the winning attempt out of a pile of candidates after the fact — the “attempt” is the deployment. For that setting, Yao and colleagues, building the tau-bench benchmark for tool-using agents interacting with simulated customers under domain policies, proposed the complementary…
Learn the underlying idea
An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.
Open the illustrated exponents: repeated multiplication and powers guide →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.