ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

LLM Reasoning Traces Reveal Myopic Planning in Board Game

ai-technology · 2026-05-11

A new study from arXiv (2605.06840) introduces a method to extract search trees from LLM reasoning traces in the game four-in-a-row. Researchers found LLM search is shallower than humans, with performance predicted by breadth not depth. Move choices are best explained by a myopic model ignoring deep nodes, confirmed by causal intervention.

Key facts

  • Method extracts search trees from LLM reasoning traces
  • Applied to four-in-a-row board game
  • LLM search is shallower than human search
  • Performance predicted by search breadth, not depth
  • Move choices best explained by myopic model ignoring deep nodes
  • Causal intervention study confirmed findings
  • Published on arXiv with ID 2605.06840

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources