# Program of Thoughts

> Program of Thoughts (PoT) prompting expresses numerical reasoning as executable code, separating computation, done by an interpreter, from reasoning, done by the model.

- Identifier: PTL-0046
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/program-of-thoughts/
- Also known as: PoT
- Introduced: 2022

## Description

Developed concurrently with PAL, it showed strong gains on financial and math question answering.

## Related terms

- [Program-Aided Language Models](https://protologue.com/t/program-aided-language-models/)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-thought/)

## Sources

- Chen et al. (2022). Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12588

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Program of Thoughts. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0046). https://protologue.com/t/program-of-thoughts/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)