This original definition of Fahlman's seems nearly equivalent (isomorphic?) to 
production rules in expert systems, perhaps with the agenda built-in (depending 
on how you define "available for access at once"), no?
  (01)
By the way, I really liked Fahlman's NETL, back in the day. 
  (02)
Thanks,
Leo
  (03)
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-

>bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa

>Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:59 AM

>To: [ontolog-forum]

>Subject: [ontolog-forum] Marvin Minsky's original memo on frames

>
>As Pat Hayes observed, this forum has been rehashing many ideas that

>have been kicked around in AI and related fields for a long time. One

>of the "oldies but goodies" is the term 'frame', which is now used for

>a very watered-down version of a much more complex and richer notion

>that Marvin Minsky presented in his famous AI Memo of 1974.

>
>Most people who talk about frames don't realize that the original

>definition was introduced in an unpublished essay by Scott Fahlman,

>who was a graduate student at MIT at the time. Minsky adopted that

>word and quoted a large excerpt from Fahlman's essay. He also

>quoted and related many other sources in AI and cognitive science.

>
>I recently happened to re-read that memo, and I was impressed by its

>relevance to the issues discussed in Ontolog Forum. That 40-year-old

>memo is still a good summary of many research problems today. See

>the URL and excerpts below.

>
>And by the way, Fahlman's most successful ;-) innovation was the

>sideways smiley face: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm

>
>John

>_________________________________________________________________

>____

>
>Source: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html

>
>Fahlman's original definition, quoted by Minsky:

>
>> Frame Verification: I envision a data base in which related sets

>> of facts and demons are grouped into packets, any number of which

>> can be activated or made available for access at once. A packet can

>> contain any number of other packets (recursively), in the sense that

>> if the containing packet is activated, the contained packets are

>> activated as well, and any data items in them become available unless

>> they are specifically modified or canceled. Thus, by activating a few

>> appropriate packets, the system can create a tailor-made execution

>> environment containing only the relevant portion of its global

>> knowledge and an appropriate set of demons. Sometimes, of course,

>> it will have to add specific new packets to the active set in order

>> to deal with some special situation, but this inconvenience will be

>> far less than the burden of constantly tripping over unwanted

>> knowledge or triggering spurious demons.

>
>Observation by the psychologist Max Wertheimer, quoted by Minsky:

>
>> If one tries to describe processes of genuine thinking in terms of

>> formal traditional logic, the result is often unsatisfactory; one has,

>> then, a series of correct operations, but the sense of the process and

>> what was vital, forceful, creative in it seems somehow to have evaporated

>> in the formulations.

>
>Minsky's opening paragraph:

>
>> It seems to me that the ingredients of most theories both in Artificial

>> Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too minute, local,

>> and unstructured to account – either practically or phenomenologically –

>> for the effectiveness of common-sense thought. The "chunks" of reasoning,

>> language, memory, and "perception" ought to be larger and more structured;

>> their factual and procedural contents must be more intimately connected

>> in order to explain the apparent power and speed of mental activities.

>
>Minsky's closing paragraph:

>
>> I cannot state strongly enough my conviction that the preoccupation with

>> Consistency, so valuable for Mathematical Logic, has been incredibly

>> destructive to those working on models of mind. At the popular level it

>> has produced a weird conception of the potential capabilities of machines

>> in general. At the "logical" level it has blocked efforts to represent

>> ordinary knowledge, by presenting an unreachable image of a corpus of

>> context-free "truths" that can stand separately by themselves. This

>> obsession has kept us from seeing that thinking begins with defective

>> networks that are slowly (if ever) refined and updated.

>
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