AI Rookies

Best-of-N Sampling

Fact

A method that makes several answers, then picks the best-scoring one.

In Plain Words

It is like taking five selfies before posting. You keep the one without the weird blink.

AI uses it for math and code. More tries can help. They also cost more computer work.

Related Concepts

Temperature
Temperature controls how different the sampled answers are.

LLM-as-a-judge
An LLM-as-a-judge can score and rank several answers.

Inference
Making and comparing many answers adds more inference cost.

Reasoning-model
A Reasoning-model often uses many reasoning paths to pick a more reliable answer.