Equation 27 · Part 2 · 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
A single successful run is evidence that a task is solvable, not evidence that a system solves it reliably, and the statistics that separate the two claims already exist: pass@k for whether at least one of several attempts succeeds, pass ^k for the much stricter question of whether every one of them does, confidence intervals for whether an observed difference is more than noise, time-horizon curves for how reliability changes as a task grows, and a clear accounting of how a number was elicited before it is compared against how a system actually behaves once deployed. None of this is a call for more skepticism in the abstract. It is a call to ask, of any reported agent capability, which of…
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.
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