hanks-mcdermott-yale-shooting-objections

IN premisesummaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Frame_problem-chunk-2.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:49+00:00

Hanks and McDermott raised the Yale shooting problem as an objection to the default logic solution of the frame problem.

Summary

Hanks and McDermott showed that a well-known reasoning scenario (the Yale shooting problem) breaks the default-logic approach to the frame problem, meaning that simply assuming "things stay the same unless told otherwise" does not reliably handle situations where an action's indirect effects matter. This matters because it flags a gap in how the system might reason about change and persistence in planning tasks.