---
title: "Self-Consistency (N-sample) · agent topology · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/design/topologies/self-consistency/
description: "N parallel solvers explore sampled reasoning paths; a majority-vote aggregator collapses them to one consistent answer."
section: "Design · Topologies"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Self-Consistency (N-sample)

N parallel solvers explore sampled reasoning paths; a majority-vote aggregator collapses them to one consistent answer.

Verified against [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02533)

- [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02533)

A self-consistency agent runs the same problem through N independent reasoning attempts, each sampling a different path, then aggregates them by majority vote or a scorer into one answer. It trades compute for reliability: any single chain may err, but the consensus of many is far more robust. It is a well-established technique for hard reasoning where a single pass is unreliable. In anatomy terms it is one reasoning core fanned out N times, then reduced.

## In the anatomy

One reasoning core is sampled N times in parallel with different seeds or paths; a reducer aggregates by vote or score; no external effectors act until the answer is chosen.

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Pattern | Self-Consistency (N-sample) |
| State model | stateless |
| Example | MASS Self-Consistency reference topology |

## Common use cases

## Strengths

## Weaknesses

## Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.

## Verified against

- [https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02533](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02533)

The corpus does not rewrite vendor documentation. Where copy is quoted verbatim it is marked as such and attributed to its source.