Tree of Thoughts (ToT) Pattern

Tree of Thoughts (ToT) Pattern

Multi-path reasoning that explores, evaluates, and backtracks. Achieved 74% success rate on Game of 24 vs 4% with standard CoT.

Activation

Triggers on:

• Problems requiring non-trivial planning
• Decision trees with multiple valid paths
• Complex debugging with multiple hypotheses
• Creative tasks with evaluation criteria

Process

Phase 1: Decompose

Break problem into intermediate steps that can be evaluated independently.

Phase 2: Generate (Branch)

At each step, generate 3 candidate "thoughts" (reasoning paths):

STEP N:
├─ Thought A: [approach 1]
├─ Thought B: [approach 2]
└─ Thought C: [approach 3]

Phase 3: Evaluate

Score each thought (0-10) on:

• Progress toward goal
• Feasibility
• Reversibility if wrong

Phase 4: Search Strategy

• BFS: Explore all branches at depth N before N+1 (shallow trees)
• DFS: Follow promising paths deeper (deep trees)
• Beam Search: Keep top-K paths at each level

Phase 5: Backtrack

If path scores drop below threshold (5/10), backtrack to last good node.