Pith Number

pith:N7ZGSYXB

pith:2026:N7ZGSYXBVROCMHSLONW7LMC5SH

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Extracting Search Trees from LLM Reasoning Traces Reveals Myopic Planning

Ji-An Li, Kayla Lee, Marcelo G. Mattar, Saner Cakir, Sinan Akcali, Sixing Chen

LLMs expand deep nodes in game reasoning traces but choose moves using only shallow lookahead.

arxiv:2605.06840 v5 · 2026-05-07 · cs.AI

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{N7ZGSYXBVROCMHSLONW7LMC5SH}

Prints a linked badge after your title and injects PDF metadata. Compiles on arXiv. Learn more · Embed verified badge

Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

although LLMs expand deep nodes in their traces, their move choices are best explained by a myopic model that ignores those nodes entirely

C2weakest assumption

That the extracted search trees faithfully represent the LLM's internal planning process and that the fitted computational models correctly identify the causal drivers of move selection from those trees.

C3one line summary

LLMs exhibit myopic planning in games, with move choices driven by shallow nodes despite deep reasoning traces, in contrast to human deep-search reliance.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-25T02:01:22.330700Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

6ff26962e1ac5c261e4b736df5b05d91f3c5018b9a436ae67d31b385570c0745

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.06840 · arxiv_version: 2605.06840v5 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.06840 · pith_short_12: N7ZGSYXBVROC · pith_short_16: N7ZGSYXBVROCMHSL · pith_short_8: N7ZGSYXB

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/N7ZGSYXBVROCMHSLONW7LMC5SH \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 6ff26962e1ac5c261e4b736df5b05d91f3c5018b9a436ae67d31b385570c0745

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "69450002addcf1c692679267e9fc35077c4296348cbcd105343d7524328ba109",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-07T18:45:46Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "60850fa24959f61381d5a871661d9f7da8643698369c4898ea4d588309c94124"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.06840",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 5
  }
}