Tree of Thought

Explore multiple reasoning paths before committing to improve planning and creative tasks.

Category: Engineering | Type: Skills

Skills: Tree-of-Thought, Exploration, Planning

Techniques: Constraint-Based

Prompt

Tree-of-Thought (ToT) explores multiple reasoning paths before committing. Unlike Chain-of-Thought (one linear path), ToT branches: 1. Generate — propose 3-5 different approaches to [your problem]. 2. Evaluate — for each approach, assess feasibility and likelihood of success (score 1-10). 3. Expand — take the top 2-3 and develop each one step further. 4. Prune — eliminate paths that hit dead ends or contradictions. 5. Select — choose the path with the strongest reasoning chain. Prompt template: "Consider this problem: [your problem]. Generate three distinct solution approaches. For each, take one reasoning step. Evaluate which approach is most promising and explain why. Continue only with the best path." ToT excels at planning, creative problems, and puzzles where the first intuition is often wrong. The cost is more tokens — use it when accuracy matters more than speed.

Browse all prompts at Ask Wisely