Comment by floriangoebel
1 day ago
Nice work! Recently I prototyped a harness for structured agentic research work and I arrived at something very similar.
I found it especially useful for balancing research breadth vs research width when exploring new topics. A graph structure makes it easier for me to identify potential blind spots in the research process and allows me to be more confident that no promising alternative solutions were left out while at the same time not getting too stuck in rabbit holes of subquestions.
When I built my prototype I had this image of a physarum slime mold [0] in my head that branches off into all directions first, then reinforces potential paths while starving off all other branches. In the end that path that survives is the result.
The slime mold analogy is very accurate: research begins by exploring multiple directions, then gradually strengthens the path supported by evidence, stopping other branches from entering subsequent reasoning, but still leaving traces of exploration.
ThoughtDAG currently deliberately leaves this strengthening and pruning to the user, rather than letting the model choose automatically (I think human-in-the-loop is important). I'm curious, in your prototype, is the path strengthened manually by the user, or is it done through model scoring or other signals?