Strictly speaking, expert systems are AI as well, as in, an expert comes up with a bunch of if/else rules. So yes technically speaking even if they didn’t acquire the weights using ML and hand-coded them, it could still be called AI.

It is 100% valid to label an algorithm that plays tic-tac-toe as "AI"

Much of the early AI research was spent on developing various algorithms that could play board games.

Didn't even need computers, one early AI was MENACE [1], a set of 304 matchboxes which could learn how to play noughts and crosses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

Yup this is exactly my point, in the 80s there were plenty of “AI” companies and “fuzzy logic” was the buzzword of the day.

I built the Matchbox for Hexapawn, detailed in National Geographic Kids!

I didn't know what a Jujube was, but I got the idea.

That Hexapawn article was my first introduction to AI as a kid, though I never actually built it.

Found it in a "Reader's Digest Young Persons annual" which my dad got when he was a kid in the 60s. I still have that.

The original article from Scientific American: https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/idocs/GardnerHexapawn.pd...

You're probably talking about the same book I had then. I also remember it started off with a Mercury astronaut story, also had the story of Shackleton's Arctic voyage, and a two-page game board that was about trying to drive a car around China.

Not the same. The story about John Glenn's "day in space" was about half way through, nothing about Shackleton and the two-page board game was "race to the moon"

The board game was paired with an abridged version of Wernher von Braun's "First Men to the Moon", which 7-year-old me assumed was an accurate depiction of the moon landings (literally in the same book as an actual Mercury mission, and the Challenger Deep dive).

They were probably pulling from the same pool of articles.