Knowledge representation and reasoning

Possibly the most central problem to Artificial intelligence is the problem of how to store and manipulate knowledge.

Some people think it would be best to represent knowledge in the same way it's represented in human mind, which is the only known working intelligence so far. Memes might be used as one of such approaches. Other people say that because we don't really know how knowledge is represented in human minds, if this representation is efficent or not, and if it would work in computers as well as in biological brains, non-human representations should also be tried.

From earliest times, the knowledge frame or just "frame" has been used. A frame consists of "slots" which contain values; for instance, the frame for "house" might contain a "color" slot, "number of floors" slot, etc.

Frames can behave something like object oriented programming languages, with inheritance of features described by the "is-a" link. However, there has been no small amount of inconsistency in the usage of the "is-a" link: someone wrote a paper titled "What IS-A is and isn't", wherein 29 different semantics were found in projects whose knowledge representation schemes involved an "is-a" link. Other links include the "has-part" link.

Frames suffer from the Frame problem of knowledge linking.

Scripts are a type of frame that describes what happens temporally; the usual example given is that describing going to a restaurant. The steps include waiting to be seated, receiving a menu, ordering, etc.