# Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Introduced in [Wei et al. (2022)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903), chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables complex reasoning capabilities through intermediate reasoning steps. You can combine it with few-shot prompting to get better results on more complex tasks that require reasoning before responding.

*Prompt:*
```
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 4, 8, 9, 15, 12, 2, 1.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (9, 15, 1) gives 25. The answer is False.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 17,  10, 19, 4, 8, 12, 24.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (17, 19) gives 36. The answer is True.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 16,  11, 14, 4, 8, 13, 24.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (11, 13) gives 24. The answer is True.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 17,  9, 10, 12, 13, 4, 2.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (17, 9, 13) gives 39. The answer is False.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 15, 32, 5, 13, 82, 7, 1. 
A:
```

*Output:*
```
Adding all the odd numbers (15, 5, 13, 7, 1) gives 41. The answer is False.
```

Wow! We can see a perfect result when we provided the reasoning step. In fact, we can solve this task by providing even fewer examples, i.e., just one example seems enough:

*Prompt:*
```
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 4, 8, 9, 15, 12, 2, 1.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (9, 15, 1) gives 25. The answer is False.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 15, 32, 5, 13, 82, 7, 1. 
A:
```

*Output:*
```
Adding all the odd numbers (15, 5, 13, 7, 1) gives 41. The answer is False.
```

Keep in mind that the authors claim that this is an emergent ability that arises with sufficiently large language models.