A conundrum known as the frame problem within artificial intelligence concerns the application of knowledge about the past to draw inferences about the future. It requires distinguishing those properties that change across time against a background of those properties that do not, which thus constitute a frame (Charniak and McDermott 1985). From the point of view of philosophy it appears to be a special case of the problem of induction, which requests justification for drawing inferences about the future based on knowledge of the past. David Hume, in particular, suggested that one's expectations about the future are no more than habits of the mind and doubted that knowledge relating the future to the past was possible.

Bertrand Russell, a twentieth-century student of Hume's eighteenth-century problem, observed that this problem cannot be resolved merely by stipulation or by postulating that the future will be like the past. That...