> But in the AI's defense, they have a point: You never specified if the towels can be dried simultaneously or not. Maybe you have to use a drying machine that can only do one at a time. This one seems to consistently work:

This is the inverse of the Frame Problem, or the Qualification problem:

John McCarthy's paper related to it from the 1980's

http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/circumscription/circumscrip...

It is still very relevent to modern AI efforts.