CONCEPT
Frame Problem
The structural impossibility of specifying in advance which features of a situation are relevant to a given task—first identified by McCarthy and Hayes in 1969, diagnosed by Dreyfus as a symptom of the deeper philosophical error in treating intelligence as disembodied computation.
The frame problem was identified by John McCarthy and Patrick Hayes in their 1969 paper 'Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence.' It asks: how does a system know which features of a situation to attend to, and which to ignore, when it acts? When a robot lifts a cup, does it need to represent that the table does not disappear, that gravity still applies, that the cup's color does not change? The problem is that the list of potentially relevant features is indefinite, and any attempt to enumerate them in advance either omits something that matters or multiplies representations past any finite bound. Dreyfus argued that the frame problem was not a technical puzzle to be solved by cleverer representation schemes but a symptom of the deeper philosophical error in treating intelligence as the manipulation of explicit representations—an error that phenomenology had already diagnosed decades earlier.
