 Nevertheless, the aficionado may still be confident that the original result is true, but we can see how such confidence would decrease with successive replication failures. More formally, let \(F_N\) be the last replication failure in a sequence of N replication failures \(\langle F_1,F_2,\ldots,F_N\rangle\). Then, the aficionado’s confidence in the original result given the Nth replication failure is expressible in the  equation:[3] 