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13. Reasoning and Test-Time Compute

Spending extra computation at inference to think before answering. Children cluster into the phenomenon (reasoning, thinking, chain-of-thought, hidden reasoning, reasoning summary), the budget lever (inference/test-time compute, reasoning effort, thinking budget), and the cognitive moves (planning, decomposition, reflection, verification). The core idea: quality can be bought with compute at run time, not just at training time — a recent axis that reframes inference.

Children

  • reasoning
  • thinking
  • chain-of-thought
  • hidden reasoning
  • reasoning summary
  • inference-time compute
  • test-time compute
  • reasoning effort
  • thinking budget
  • planning
  • decomposition
  • reflection
  • verification