The big picture

The story of this folder is a climb up five steps, each one giving the model a new thinking power.

flowchart TD
    A[1. Think out loud<br/>Chain of Thought] --> B[2. Think and act<br/>ReAct, tool use]
    B --> C[3. Check the work<br/>Verify step by step]
    C --> D[4. Learn to reason by practice<br/>DeepSeek-R1]
    D --> E[5. Think beyond memory limits<br/>Recursive Language Models]

Here is how the five papers map onto that climb.

Step	New power	Paper
Think out loud	Show the steps, get better answers	Chain-of-Thought Prompting
Think and act	Mix reasoning with using tools	ReAct
Check the work	Reward each step, not just the final answer	Let's Verify Step by Step
Learn by practice	Use reinforcement learning to grow reasoning	DeepSeek-R1
Beat memory limits	Process inputs far bigger than the context window	Recursive Language Models