Chain of Thought Prompting
Domain: Prompt Engineering
🎯 Motivation
For reasoning tasks, asking the model to show its intermediate steps dramatically improves accuracy.
📋 Concrete Example
‘If I have 3 boxes with 4 apples each and eat 5, how many left? Think step by step.’ Model: ‘3 x 4 = 12 apples. 12 - 5 = 7. Answer: 7.’ The step-by-step process prevents errors.
🔗 Analogy
A math teacher requiring you to show your work - instead of just writing ‘7’, you write each calculation step. This catches mistakes and proves understanding. CoT does this for LLMs.