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Equation 4 · Part 5 · Ten Failure Modes That Define Deployed AI Safety Systems

subtraction

P(at least one success in k tries)=1−(1−p)k.P(\text{at least one success in } k \text{ tries}) = 1 - (1-p)^k.
subtraction

What this part means

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

Its job in the formula

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

The passage around this formula

The failure modes built on repeated querying — jailbreak search, paraphrase evasion, mismatched-language generalisation — share a further structural property worth stating precisely, because a single strong per-attempt success rate is often reported as though it settled the question of robustness on its own. Suppose a safeguard blocks a fixed, independently generated attack attempt with probability 1-p , so a single try succeeds only with probability p . An adversary who is not limited to one try, and who runs k independent attempts — exactly the loop PAIR and the suffix-search method both implement mechanically [ 2 , 1 ] — succeeds at least once with probability P(at least one success in k tries)=1−(1−p)kP(\text{at least one success in } k \text{ tries}) = 1 - (1-p)^k. At p =…

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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