[ncallaway]

In games "AI" is the term for the system that controls the behavior of NPCs and other non-controlled entities.

It's not claiming to be "academic AI".

Games have been using this terminology for decades.

[jfkebwjsbx]

It is academic AI.

People simply have no clue what AI actually means and think it is only about sci-fi robots and ML.

[ncallaway]

That's fair. I guess I meant more "the frontier of academic AI", but then again I don't really keep up with academic AI at all, so I might just be wrong about what academic AI is. I can't really make any strong claims about academia.

My stronger claim is that this falls so squarely within the bounds of "game AI" that it's fairly ludicrous to say it's not AI.

[FZ1]

A* search counts as academic AI. If-then statements do not.

[Der_Einzige]

Such a wrong take. Decision trees are nothing more than if statements. Fancier versions of those (random forests) are consistently near SOTA algorithms like neural networks (and beat them on tabular datasets frequently). AI can be just a shit ton of if/else statements.

[jfkebwjsbx]

If-then statements are definitely AI, and A* is also a bunch of if-then statements.

[ncallaway]

It's kinda cool that we get to interact with the final arbiter of the bounds of the term "academic AI".