Simplicity in solving the frame problem

This paper presents an approach for reasoning about action and change which appeals to the principle of Occam's razor-roughly stating that the simplest explanations are the best ones-as the underlying theme of commonsense reasoning. We conduct a preliminary investigation of how appealing to simplicity allows us to address some of the challenges faced when reasoning about the effects of actions. In particular, we apply Occam's razor to the transformations between worlds specified by an action. To formalise these notions we use Kolmogorov complexity to identify the intended (simplest) transformation given an action description. We give some preliminary support for our claims by showing that the formalism captures our intuitions on some simple examples.