Definition
Plain language
How long something actually takes in real-world seconds, as opposed to how much computation it does.
As stated in the literature
Elapsed real time for a computation, distinct from FLOPs or token counts; used as the budget axis in challenges like Autoresearch and as a cost metric for sandbox checkpointing, agent search, and RL training throughput.
Also called: wall-clock, wall clock
Why it matters: It captures how long users and researchers actually wait, which is the cost that matters in practice regardless of raw computation counts.
For example, a task might take ten real-world minutes even if the computer was doing heavy calculation for only part of that stretch.
Heard on the show
“… guess at expansions on slightly stale information and roll back the bad guesses — and it cuts the wall-clock overhead from about fourteen percent down to under five, with accuracy basically untouched. …”Episode 162 — The Empty-Lake Proof: Why More Rollouts Stop Helping Reasoning Models