Remix.run Logo
The Frame Problem (2004)(plato.stanford.edu)
19 points by rzk 4 hours ago | 4 comments
discarded1023 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This was a big concern when I was an undergrad in the 1990s. I've since wondered if bunched implications / separation logic / separation algebras / ... [1] that emerged in the early 2000s has resolved this well enough. Opinions?

At least some of the problem was due to people unnecessarily restricting themselves to first-order logic for knowledge representation, as advocated by John McCarthy [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_logic

[2] see e.g. https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/concepts.pdf

ian_j_butler 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> resolved this well enough. Opinions?

Not at all resolved. If anything it is worse than before as we begin to understand it better, and now there are different versions of it that cover representation, relevance, epistemics. Pivoting "away" from logic just relocates it again. Arguably the whole challenge of neurosymbolics is (still) getting a persistent sidecar for logic bolted onto something like a language model. We actually have fairly decent autoformalizers (!!) and we still can't make that work very well in general. From one perspective, the frame problem is pretty closely related to the "binding problem", and relevance is central to both. We have good pure logics for relevance and epistemics too, but can't get language models to drive them very well, and language models alone are terrible at trying to do this sort of thing natively (see distractor sensitivity). Neurosymbolics probably is the key, but until there's more traffic between old-school and new we're facing the same old problems.

When/if there's real progress.. I think we'd know. It may or may not be AGI-complete but the improvements for things like long-horizon and truly out-of-distribution planning would probably be immediate, obvious, and jaw dropping

Joker_vD 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Heh. Reminds me of one of Lewis Carroll's sylogisms:

    Premise A: "No one, who means to go by the train and cannot get a conveyance, and has not enough time to walk to the station, can do without running";

    Premise B: "This party of tourists mean to go by the train and cannot get a conveyance, but they have plenty of time to walk to the station".

    Does the conclusion "This party of tourists need not run" hold?
It actually doesn't; here's a non-formulaic reason:

[Here is another opportunity, gentle Reader, for playing a trick on your innocent friend. Put the proposed Syllogism before him, and ask him what he thinks of the Conclusion.

He will reply “Why, it’s perfectly correct, of course! And if your precious Logic-book tells you it isn’t, don’t believe it! You don’t mean to tell me those tourists need to run? If I were one of them, and knew the Premisses to be true, I should be quite clear that I needn’t run—and I should walk!”

And you will reply “But suppose there was a mad bull behind you?”

And then your innocent friend will say “Hum! Ha! I must think that over a bit!”

You may then explain to him, as a convenient test of the soundness of a Syllogism, that, if circumstances can be invented which, without interfering with the truth of the Premisses, would make the Conclusion false, the Syllogism must be unsound.]

MarkusQ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

tl;dr: Since the AI people have lost interest in the frame problem (because they think they can ignore it like the new wave folks, work around it like Fodor, or like Shanahan, think of it as solved) the philosophers would like it back please.