AI Founding Fathers: A Case Study of GIS Search in Multi-Agent Pipelines

Abstract: Although LLMs show exceptional fluency, efforts persist to extract stronger reasoning capabilities from them. Drawing on search-based interpretations of LLM computation, this paper advances a systematic framework for understanding LLM reasoning and optimization. Namely, that enhancing reasoning is best achieved by structuring a multi-agent pipeline to ensure a traversal of the search space in a gradual, incremental, and sequential (GIS) manner. Stated succinctly, high-quality reasoning is a controlled, incremental search. To test this framework, we investigate the efficacy of recursive refinement (RR)--an iterative process of self-criticism, adversarial stress-testing, and integrating critical feedback--as a practical method for implementing GIS search. We designed an experiment comparing a simple, linear pipeline against a complex, explicitly structured pipeline leveraging a recursive refinement layer. The multi-agent models were constructed to reflect the historical personas of three US Founding Fathers (Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison) using RAG-powered corpora and were prompted to generate responses to three contemporary political issues. Model performance was evaluated using a two-tiered approach: a quantitative score from an LLM arbiter agent and qualitative human judgment. Our results revealed that the complex model consistently outperformed the simple model across all nine test cases with an average arbiter-outputted score of 88.3 versus 71.7. The complex model's arguments were superior in analytical depth, structural nuance, and strategic framing. We conclude that recursive refinement is a robust architectural feature for enhancing LLM reasoning via GIS search.