You’re moving the goalposts, which is exactly what I referred to. Search algorithms and pathfinding have absolutely been AI historically, just go take a look at the table of contents of Norvig’s AI:MA. And I mean the 4rd edition that was published in 2020. A good 90% of the book is classical algorithmics.

It’s pretty hilarious and history-blind to claim that AI is just 2015+ era deep neural magic black boxes or something, as if the field wasn’t invented until then. As if neural networks themselves hadn’t been tried several times at that point and found okay for classification tasks but not much more.

As if for a long time, most AI researchers didn’t even want to talk about neural networks because they feared that their "cool" factor takes focus away from real AI research, and because the last time NNs were a big deal it was followed by one of the AI winters of broken promises and dwindling budgets.