You're making my point (game AI != ML-based AI). If "Game AI" needs to be distinguished from ML/actual AI, then it's not AI, it's just what we've historically called rule-based logic.
The original claim was "Bots are AI, always have been". I gave counterexamples: IRC bots, web crawlers, Quake bots. None of these involve intelligence, they're deterministic programs following explicit rules.
Your "game physics" analogy is also weak. Physics simulation approximates real physical laws. Calling it "physics" makes sense, it's modeling physics. But pathfinding algorithms and decision trees aren't modeling intelligence; they're just conditional logic. That doesn't make it accurate or correct, just conventional.
We need to stop calling things that aren't AI, AI, especially today.
