Wait, why did I come to the kitchen?

Note: This is a quick study, not a full research idea Abstract This study investigates whether backtracking, when an LLM corrects its reasoning path mid-solution, improves performance on mathematical reasoning tasks. Using a subset of 296 problems from GSM8K with the DeepSeek-R1 model, I found backtracking improves success rates by 8.19% overall. This improvement scales with problem difficulty,…