Equation 5 · Part 1 · Measuring AI Agent Reliability: What the Evidence Actually Supports
Symbol k
What this part means
the number of samples.
Its job in the formula
k is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol k→Article meaning
Where the article explains it
The obvious approach — generate exactly k samples per problem and check whether any of them pass — has an undesirable property: it is a valid estimate but a high-variance one, since it throws away information every time you happen to generate more or fewer than k samples.
The passage around this formula
…a code-generating model against the HumanEval benchmark, they needed a way to score the strategy of drawing several candidate solutions from the model and keeping the best one. The obvious approach — generate exactly k samples per problem and check whether any of them pass — has an undesirable property: it is a valid estimate but a high-variance one, since it throws away information every time you happen to generate more or fewer than k samples. Their fix was to over-sample: draw n total samples per task,…
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A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.