In artificial intelligence, the frame problem was initially formulated as the problem of expressing a dynamical domain in logic without explicitly specifying which conditions are not affected by an action. John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes defined this problem in their 1969 article, Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence.

Later, the term acquired a broader meaning in philosophy, where it is formulated as the problem of limiting the beliefs that have to be updated in response to actions. The name "frame problem" derives from a common technique used by animated cartoon makers called framing where the currently moving parts of the cartoon are superimposed on the "frame," which depicts the background of the scene, which does not change. In the logical context, actions are typically specified by what they change, with the implicit assumption that everything else (the frame) remains unchanged.

The frame problem occurs even in very simple domains. A scenario with a door, which can be open or closed, and a light, which can be on or off, is statically represented by two propositions open and on. If these conditions can change, they are better represented by two predicates open(t) and on(t) that depend on time; such predicates are called fluents.

A domain in which the door is closed, the light is off, and the door is opened at time 1 can be directly represented in logic by the following formulae: The first two formulae represent the initial situation; the third formula represents the effect of executing the action of opening the door at time 1. If such an action had preconditions, such as the door must not be locked, it would have been represented by ; this is not needed for this exposition. This is a simplified formalization in which the effects of actions are specified directly in the time points in which the actions are executed.

In practice, one would have a predicate execute_open(t) for specifying when an action is executed and a rule for specifying the effects of actions; this is also not needed for this exposition (the article on the situation calculus gives more details.)

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