Chain-of-Thought & self-consistency

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is the foundation every other reasoning pattern builds on:
eliciting step-by-step reasoning either through explicit worked examples or simply
by instructing the model to reason before answering. CoT gives a model the ability
to reason within a single step before committing to an action. Self-consistency
extends CoT by sampling several independent reasoning paths and taking the majority
answer, trading compute for reliability on problems with a verifiable single
answer.