Dürer's 1514 engraving Melencolia I — geometer's tools, magic square, brooding angel — rendered in sepia and footnoted in fine print: *contemplating CoT since 1514.
The angel's posture is recognizable to anyone who has tried to coax a language model toward step-by-step reasoning. Chain of Thought may simply be the rediscovery, after five hundred years, of thinking.
