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upghost parent
Interesting that this used to be called "AI". I'm still trying to figure out what to call the umbrella field of Artificial Intelligence now that "AI" has come to mean the genAI subset of DL which is a subset of ML which is a subset of what used to be called "AI".
dspillett
> Interesting that this used to be called "AI".

What has been called AI in gaming in the past is rich and varied, and goes all the way down to a computer control opponent “seeing” a player and opening fire, moving towards, or moving away. Any code controlling NPC was referred to as “the AI of the game” even if all the code was doing was applying a few simple rote rules rather than following an exactly pre-specified sequence.

“AI” in gaming means (or has previously meant) a lot less than “AI” has meant in other fields, but with the increasing use of “AI” in all contexts this will soon no longer be the case.

bonoboTP
Not just computer game AI. Literally university courses called "Artificial Intelligence" would teach A*, formal logic, planning, knowledge representation, etc. See for example the famous Russell-Norvig textbook. Since deep learning became dominant around 2012-2014, that conception of AI is now (somewhat deprecatingly) called GOFAI, or "good old-fashioned AI".
throwawayoldie
I'm old enough that my AI class in undergrad was taught from the first edition of Russell and Norvig. Neural networks (i.e. the basis of 95% of what today is called "AI") got one chapter, and it wasn't a long or detailed chapter either.
upghost OP
I guess the 5th edition will need to be called "Artificial Intelligence: An Outdated Approach".

I absolutely love that book. Maybe that's why I get a little cringey at the "AI" monicker for LLMs.

kccqzy
There is also certainly more sophisticated AI in gaming. Remember the AI used by Deep Blue in chess? Or the AI used by DeepMind in Go against Lee Sedol? Classic games like chess or Go receive more attention from the AI community than contemporary video games.
yeasku
Open AI tried it with Dota 2 and had to limit the gameplay a lot to be competetive against humans.
diggan
The definition of "AI" has for a long time now been basically "We know it works somehow, but only few people really understand it", which is a moving target. At one point in the future, the LLMs we use today won't even be called AI anymore.
Al-Khwarizmi
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

PS: the wiki article needs updating with more confirmation from the LLM era, if anyone's up for it... :)

throwawayoldie
"Artificial intelligence" has always been a marketing term, not a technical one. John McCarthy coined the phrase when he was applying for a DARPA grant, and he picked it because he thought it would sound cool to the grant reviewers.
tsumnia
The way I explain it to my students is through a venn diagram of "Traditional AI", "Machine Learning", and "Data Science" (though I suppose Gen AI is starting to form another circle). A* falls into the "Traditional AI" space, which is a mixed of state searching, logic representation, and statistics/probability (now called data science). What general public considers "AI" is where all the circles meet, and it means everything from Robots to if-else statements.
pantulis
> Interesting that this used to be called "AI".

I remember learning about A* in the AI lab at the University. Now these things sound trivial and we take them for granted. The joys of becoming old.

ecshafer
I took a course in grad school on "Game AI" that put different path finding approaches and methods of making decisions into a useful bucket away from ML and AI.
a-dub
a lot of early ai was simply applied classical data structures and algorithms.

although perceptrons go back decades and decades.

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