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Interactive 3D/o1 Reasoning Architecture
o1 / Reasoning Architecture
medium problem · 50% compute budget · 3/6 thinking steps
Hidden Chain-of-Thought Scratchpad
1. ···
2. ···
3. ···
Accuracy vs Compute (difficulty: medium)
Direct Answer
Acc: 52%1× compute
Chain-of-Thought
Acc: 78%8× compute
o1 (test-time compute)
Acc: 94%60× compute
Test-Time Compute Scaling Effect
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Budget 50% → effective accuracy: 73%
Controls
Problem Difficulty
Compute Budget
150%100
3 thinking steps allowed
o1 / reasoning models generate hidden chain-of-thought tokens before answering.

More compute budget = more thinking steps = higher accuracy on hard problems.

The scratchpad is never shown to the user.

o1 Reasoning Architecture - Interactive Visualization

OpenAI o1 and similar reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, Claude Extended Thinking) generate a hidden chain-of-thought scratchpad before producing their final answer. The scratchpad contains reasoning steps, intermediate calculations, and self-corrections that are never shown to the user. More compute budget means more thinking steps, which dramatically improves accuracy on hard mathematical and scientific problems - from 18% accuracy for direct answers to 87% for o1 with full compute budget on AIME-level problems.

  • Animated scratchpad: watch reasoning steps appear one by one in the hidden CoT
  • Compute budget slider: control how many thinking steps are allowed
  • Accuracy vs compute scaling curve: see diminishing returns at high budget
  • Three-way comparison: direct answer vs standard CoT vs o1-style reasoning
  • Problem difficulty selector: easy arithmetic, medium prime factorization, hard proof
  • Used in: OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, Anthropic Extended Thinking, QwQ

Part of the EngineersOfAI Interactive 3D - free interactive visualizations covering every major concept in machine learning and AI engineering. Hover any element for a plain-English explanation. No code required.