---
title: "Deliberate branching search over states · agent topology · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/design/topologies/tree-search/
description: "Reasoning states form a tree the agent expands and evaluates node-by-node, backtracking from dead ends. Search discipline (BFS or DFS) plus a heuristic evaluator select which branch to grow. Distinct from chain-of-thought by choosing between alternative continuations rather than committing to one."
section: "Design · Topologies"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Deliberate branching search over states

Reasoning states form a tree the agent expands and evaluates node-by-node, backtracking from dead ends. Search discipline (BFS or DFS) plus a heuristic evaluator select which branch to grow. Distinct from chain-of-thought by choosing between alternative continuations rather than committing to one.

Verified against [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601)

- [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601)

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Pattern | Deliberate branching search over states |
| State model | search-tree |
| Example | Tree of Thoughts, Yao et al. NeurIPS 2023 |

## Basis

## Verified against

- [https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601)

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