Reasoning research’s biggest shift, from symbolic traces to natural language
denny_zhou · x · 2026-07-27
The biggest shift in reasoning research, according to the author, was not a new objective but a new language: moving from symbolic/program-like traces to natural language.
- He says his 2017 work on math and puzzle solving used explicit reasoning encoded in programming languages.
- Early improvements came from training on program traces and reasoning traces generated via rejection sampling, with papers published in NeurIPS and ICLR before 2022.
- The core ideas, he argues, were already present; what changed was how reasoning is represented.
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