Equation 29 · Part 1 · The Token Tax of Giving a Model More Tools
Symbol m
What this part means
the much smaller.
Its job in the formula
m 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 m→Article meaning
Where the article explains it
Lazy discovery — Anthropic’s Tool Search Tool, or a disciplined use of MCP’s own paginated listing — replaces the n in that formula with a much smaller m , the tools actually retrieved, at the cost of a small fixed search overhead .
The passage around this formula
…the underlying inference API carries no memory between calls. Lazy discovery — Anthropic’s Tool Search Tool, or a disciplined use of MCP’s own paginated listing — replaces the n in that formula with a much smaller m , the tools actually retrieved, at the cost of a small fixed search overhead . Separately, and not reducible to a token count at all, the choice the model makes over whatever shortlist it is shown carries its own error, decomposable into a retrieval gap that shrinks as the shortlist widens…
Learn the underlying idea
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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The article lists its research sources here.