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   CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWS, AUTHOR SUMMARIES & NOMINATIONS OF BOOKS FOR REVIEW

   BOOK SUMMARY: Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World: The Frame Problem
		 KM Ford & PJ Hayes (eds)

Note: This is a reposting of PJ Hayes's summary, which was not archived
previously. PSYCOLOQUY's revised policy is now to archive book
summaries to serve as the first in the thread of multiple book reviews
and authors' responses. A review (by J. van Brakel) will follow in the
next number of PSYCOLOQUY (psycoloquy.92.3.60.frame-problem.2.vanbrakel).

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psycoloquy.92.3.59.frame-problem.1.ford+hayes  Sunday, November 1, 1992
ISSN 1055-0143                   (6 paragraphs, 16 chapters, 123 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
		Copyright 1992 Patrick J. Hayes

                SUMMARY OF:
        Kenneth M. Ford and Patrick J. Hayes (Eds.) (1991)
        Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World: The Frame Problem
        JAI Press, Greenwich CT, 289 pages, ISBN 1-55938-082-9

                Pat Hayes
                Beckman Institute
                405 North Mathews Avenue
                Urbana IL 61801
                hayes@cs.stanford.edu

1.0  What happens when one picks up a brick? Any child knows that the
brick is now held in the air, there is one fewer object on the ground,
and THAT'S ALL. For over twenty years it has been astonishingly hard to
make a computer draw this last conclusion reliably and convincingly, or
even to say precisely what it means. This "frame problem" is
symptomatic of a host of problems in how to properly represent common
knowledge about everyday actions. The papers in this collection
(originally presented at a 1989 workshop) discuss some of these
problems, develop approaches to solving them, or draw philosophical
conclusions from them.

2.0  Some approaches to action reasoning assume that what is needed is
more information for the programs to use. Others focus rather on the
reasoning methods they use. In the former spirit, Haugh develops an
axiomatic theory of causal relationships, and Weld argues that system
dynamics are needed. Tenenberg, however, urges the use of a
probabilistic approach to knowledge representation, and Brown develops
a new quantified modal logic which contains the seeds of its own
description.

3.0  Some of the papers develop or criticise themes that are familiar
in AI. Etherington, Kraus and Perlis explain and extend McCarthy's
technique of circumscriptive reasoning. Goodwin and Trudel relate the
idea of "persistence" - that things should stay true unless there is a
reason to falsify them - to that of time as a continuum (a surprisingly
underdeveloped idea in this area). Weber criticises persistence as an
unrealistically strong assumption and shows that it has some
unintuitive consequences.

4.0  Erik Sandewall makes a revisionist survey of the classical AI
literature and suggests that what has always been regarded as an
unfortunate pun - the frame problem and Minsky's representational
notation of frames - should in fact be taken seriously.

5.0  Some of the chapters discuss broader questions. Perlis relates
this whole complex of representational difficulties to the fact that
the agents we are trying to imitate have evolved with only very partial
knowledge of their worlds. Stein generalises the frame problem, as
usually described, to the point where it seems to be the general
problem of counterfactual reasoning: an alarming and controversial
conclusion. Fetzer, a philosopher of science, and Hayes, one of the
book's editors, give us a debate on the relevance of philosophy to AI.
Fetzer argues that the frame problem is really the problem of
scientific induction, so a successful robot must have solved Hume's
problem. Hayes argues that Fetzer misunderstands the nature of the AI
enterprise and Fetzer replies with a suggestion that a new kind of
programming might be the answer.

6.0  Most of the papers are self-contained and some provide excellent
introductions to the frame problem and the history of attempts to solve
it.

                      Table of Contents

Framing The Problem
      Kenneth M. Ford, University of West Florida
      Patrick J. Hayes, Xerox PARC

The Modal Quantificational Logic Z Applied to the Frame Problem
      Frank M. Brown, University of Kansas

Limited Scope and Circumscriptive Reasoning
      David Etherington, AT&T Bell Laboratories
      Sarit Kraus, Hebrew University - Israel
      Donald Perlis, University of Maryland

The Frame Problem:  Artificial Intelligence Meets David Hume
      James H. Fetzer, University of Minnesota
	
Commentary on:
"The Frame Problem:  Artificial Intelligence Meets David Hume"
      Pat Hayes, Xerox PARC
	
A Response to Pat Hayes
      J. H. Fetzer

Persistence in Continuous First Order Temporal Logics
      Scott D. Goodwin, University of Waterloo
      Andre Trudel, Acadia University

Omniscience Isn't Needed to Solve the Frame Problem
      Brian A. Haugh, Martin Marietta Laboratories

Knowledge and the Frame Problem
      Leora Morgenstern, IBM T. J. Watson Labs

Focus of Attention, Context, and the Frame Problem
      J. Terry Nutter, Virginia Tech.

Intentionality and Defaults
      Donald Perlis, University of Maryland

Towards a Logic of Dynamic Frames
      Erik Sandewall, University of Linkoping - Sweden

An Atemporal Frame Problem
      Lynn Andrea Stein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abandoning the Completeness Assumptions:
A Statistical Approach to the Frame Problem
      Josh D. Tenenberg, University of Rochester

The Myth of Domain-Independent Persistence
      Jay C. Weber, Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center

System Dynamics and the Qualification Problem
      Daniel S. Weld, University of Washington