True, it doesn't. I didn't read the question carefully enough. Path-tracing is indeed a more sophisticated form of ray-tracing. In a path-tracing engine you'll still be calculating intersections to surfaces by ray-casting, ray-marching etc. As the wikipedia page for ray-tracing states, "ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects". The range of complexity possible in that definition was already discussed in the above Quora article.