Chain of thought
Also: CoT, step-by-step reasoning
Having a model write out intermediate steps before its answer, which gives it more computation and a place to keep partial results. It helps most on arithmetic, multi-step logic and anything with a chain of constraints.
What people get wrong
The written reasoning is not a faithful record of how the answer was reached. It can be plausible, wrong, and still lead to the right answer — so it is a performance aid, not an explanation you can audit.
A definition is not an understanding. This is taught properly in Reasoning, and improving a prompt honestly, part of Prompting.
Learn this properlyTerms from the same topic