A robot that reasons about everything a bomb won't change never defuses it

In 1969, John McCarthy and Patrick Hayes named the frame problem: a logical system tracking a changing world must somehow know which facts stay the same after an action, without laboriously stating every single one. Daniel Dennett later dramatized it with a robot that, told to fetch a battery from a room with a bomb, correctly deduces every irrelevant side-effect of removing it and detonates while still thinking.

— Daniel Dennett, Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI — 1984 essay, building on McCarthy & Hayes (1969)

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