Computing with Agentic Oracles

Abstract

This paper extends the stochastic-oracle model of AI-augmented computing to include agentic oracles. Unlike a stationary stochastic oracle, which responds to the same query according to a fixed response distribution across calls, an agentic oracle can pursue a goal autonomously and may access an environment containing task-relevant resources. These capabilities affect both response distributions and token costs beyond what is visible at the query-response interface. We develop a framework for analyzing token costs in Stochastic-Oracle Turing Machines (SOTMs) that compute with agentic oracles. Each call has an \emph{orchestration token cost}, visible to the caller at the query-response interface, and an \emph{agentic token cost}, incurred by internal operations not exposed to the caller. We show that an SOTM computing with an agentic oracle that can retain intermediate state can have token-cost advantages over SOTMs using stationary stochastic oracles when solving the same task at the same quality level, both with and without environment access. We also investigate goal-loss risk, including how internal dispatch ordering can reduce exposure to irreversible actions. We provide a goal-loss avoidance criterion, derive progress--retry--goal-loss formulas, establish goal-depth lower bounds on token complexity, characterize token complexity when the probability of goal loss is zero, and show that goal-loss risk can impose an upper bound on the achievable quality of a task involving environment updates.