[Philosophy of Mind] - t, Daniel - Cognitive Wheels. The Frame Problem of AI.pdf

Cognitive Wheels:The Frame Problem of AIIn 1969, John McCarthy, the mathematician who coined the term "ArtificialIntelligence," joined forces with another AI researcher, Patrick Hayes, andcoined another term, "the frame problem." It seemed to be a devil of a problem,perhaps even a mortal blow to the hopes of AI. It looked to me like a newphilosophical or epistemological problem, certainly not an electronic pu-tational problem. What is the frame problem? In this essay I thought I wasproviding interested bystanders with a useful introduction to the problem, aswell as an account of its philosophical interest, but some people in AI,including McCarthy and Hayes (who ought to know), thought I was misleading the bystanders. The real frame problem was not, they said, what I wastalking about. Others weren't so sure. I myself no longer have any firm convictions about which problems are which, or even about which problems arereally hard after all- but something is still obstreperously resisting solution,that's for sure. Happily, there are now three follow-up volumes that pursuethese disagreements through fascinating thickets of controversy: The Robot'sDilemma (Pylyshyn, 1987), Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World(Ford and Hayes, 1991), and The Robot's Dilemma Revisited (Ford andPylyshyn, 1996). If you read and understand those volumes you will understand just about everything anybody understands about the frame upon a time there was robot, named Rl by its creators. Its onlytask was to fend for itself. One day its designers arranged for it to learnthat its spare battery, its precious energy supply, was locked in a roomwith a time bomb set to go off soon. Rl located the room and the keyto the door, and formulated a plan to rescue its battery. There wasOriginally appeared in Hookway, C., ed., Minds, Machines and Evolution (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 129- wagon in the room, and the battery was on the wagon, and RI hypothesized tha