# Tree of Thoughts

> Tree of Thoughts (ToT) lets a model explore multiple reasoning branches as a search tree, evaluating partial solutions and backtracking, rather than committing to a single left-to-right chain of thought.

- Identifier: PTL-0033
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/tree-of-thoughts/
- Also known as: ToT
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

Yao et al. combined model-generated candidate thoughts, model self-evaluation of states, and breadth- or depth-first search, producing large gains on tasks such as the Game of 24 that require planning or lookahead.

## Broader terms

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-thought/)

## Narrower terms

- [Graph of Thoughts](https://protologue.com/t/graph-of-thoughts/)

## Related terms

- [Self-Consistency](https://protologue.com/t/self-consistency/)
- [Test-Time Compute Scaling](https://protologue.com/t/test-time-compute-scaling/)

## Sources

- Yao et al. (2023). Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Tree of Thoughts. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0033). https://protologue.com/t/tree-of-thoughts/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)