# Tree of Thought (ToT)

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/tree-of-thought

> Tree of Thought prompts a model to branch into multiple reasoning paths, evaluate them, and search for the best one.

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Tree of Thought prompts a model to branch into multiple reasoning paths, evaluate them, and search for the best one.

Tree of Thought (ToT) generalizes chain-of-thought: instead of one linear reasoning trace, the model generates several candidate "thoughts" at each step, scores or votes on them, and explores the most promising branches — backtracking when a path looks weak. It frames reasoning as a search over a tree, which suits problems with many viable intermediate steps (planning, puzzles, multi-constraint writing, math). ToT trades extra tokens and latency for higher reliability on hard tasks where a single greedy chain often commits early to a wrong step. In practice it is implemented with a generator prompt, an evaluator prompt, and a controller that decides which branches to expand.

## When to use

- Hard reasoning or planning tasks where one-shot chain-of-thought is unreliable.
- Problems with a checkable intermediate state (the evaluator can score partial progress).
- When accuracy matters more than cost or speed.

## When not to use

- Simple lookups or single-step answers — the extra branches waste tokens.
- Latency-sensitive UX where each query must return fast.

## Example

```
Input: Solve a scheduling puzzle: generate 3 candidate first moves, evaluate each, expand the best two.
Output: The model discards the dead-end branch early and returns a valid schedule from the surviving path.
```

## Common mistakes

- Using ToT for trivial tasks where chain-of-thought (or no reasoning) already works.
- Skipping the evaluator step — branching without scoring is just expensive sampling.
- Letting the tree grow unbounded; cap breadth and depth to control cost.

## Related terms

- [chain-of-thought](https://promtable.com/glossary/chain-of-thought)
- [few-shot-prompting](https://promtable.com/glossary/few-shot-prompting)
- [system-prompt](https://promtable.com/glossary/system-prompt)
- [prompt-engineering](https://promtable.com/glossary/prompt-engineering)

## Sources

- [Tree of Thoughts (Yao et al., 2023)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601)

*Last updated: 2026-06-02*
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