The Problem with Solutions to the Frame Problem

Introduction The frame problem, the problem of efficiently determining which things remain the same in a changing world, 1 has been with us for over a quarter of a century -- ever since the publication of McCarthy and Hayes's famous essay, "Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence," in 1969. A quarter of a century is a very long time in the time frame of computer science, and especially in the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has itself been around for only about 40 years. Indeed, it is not much younger than the advent of logicist AI (McCarthy, 1958), that brand of AI which attempts to formalize reasoning, particularly common-sense reasoning, within mathematical logic. Present since the early years of AI, the frame problem has festered within the AI community. It has drawn, and continues to draw, manpower and talent from the pool of AI researchers, particularly from the logicist community. It has pitted logicists