Definition
Plain language
A question you can only answer by chaining together several facts looked up one after another.
As stated in the literature
A question-answering regime requiring sequential retrieval where later queries depend on earlier answers; bridge questions in HotPotQA are the canonical example and resist parallel re-sampling.
Also called: multi-hop reasoning
Why it matters: Because each step depends on the previous answer, these questions can't be shortcut and test a system's ability to chain reasoning.
For example, answering 'what's the capital of the country where this author was born?' requires first finding the country, then looking up its capital.
Heard on the show
“What dies is the deliberate stuff — multi-hop reasoning, translation, and building abstract summaries of a situation.”Episode 203 — The Thought a Model Doesn't Say — and the Lens That Reads It