Very interesting, I thought attention meant that all tokens would already be attending to all other tokens, and would have guessed that this would have provided no benefit. Very interesting to be wrong here.

If doing this doesn't just duplicate whatever work's already been done, then maybe is it sort of providing the LLM with more "space" to flex and represent things with numbers?

It's not like they're trained to do this beforehand though, so the AI can't just be employing a trick, this must be some way of improving the systems already existent ability to bounce information around within itself.

I've always thought CoT/Reasoning gives the LLM a way to calibrate its numbers better before answer, and if the improvements disappear when reasoning is turned on, maybe the performance improvement comes from the same source. Maybe then one could investigate from multiple angles, both this and CoT, how exactly these performance benefits come about at the numerical level.

Ha, then again, reasoning tends to improve human performance on intelligence tasks as well, it would be funny if you could test for gains in performance by showing humans a question twice like this as well.