Ask ChatGPT to Use Chain of Thought: Reasoning by Example

Contributed by: Mike Loukides

Difficulty level: Intermediate

Chain of thought (CoT) is a prompting technique described in “Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models” by Jason Wei et al. The idea behind CoT is that large language models are not good at logical reasoning or solving word problems. However, if you can construct a prompt that includes a similar word problem and its solution, followed by the problem that you want to solve, ChatGPT will follow the style of logic in your prompt and use it to solve your problem.

For example:

Prompt: Question: Jane is biking to school from her house. The ride to school normally takes 20 minutes. If she has biked 3 miles in 15 minutes, how far is the school from her house?

Answer: Use the formula distance = rate × time where rate is Jane’s speed and time is the time it takes her to travel a certain distance. We know that Jane has biked 3 miles in 15 minutes, so her speed is:

rate = distance / time = 3 miles / 15 minutes = 0.2 miles per minute

We also know that the ride to school normally takes 20 minutes. Using the rate we just calculated, we can find the distance to school as follows:

distance = rate × time = 0.2 miles per minute × 20 minutes = 4 miles

Therefore, the school is 4 miles away from Jane’s house.

Question: My commute to work requires an hour-long commuter train trip. If I have traveled 40 miles in 45 minutes, how far is the commute?

I haven’t ...