At most, Band-in-a-Box would be considered an expert system.

People define AI differently. Some would include expert systems as a subfield of AI. Others would exclude expert systems, based on the lack of learning and adapting. FWIW, in my experience the public considers all of these types of programs AI.

Around 1980, I was a Medical Student, and did a 3 month elective at U. Pittsburgh working on a great AI computer medical diagnosis program called Caduceus. The program was well known in AI circles, and is referenced here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CADUCEUS_(expert_system) . I wasn't involved at all in the LISP programming, just helping out with researching some disease symptoms/signs to add to the database. It was a great experience and I learned a lot from the team headed by Dr. Jack Meyers. But I see Caduceus listed in Wikipedia, and they even have to prominently append "Expert System" to the name. There was a lot of AI in the program, dealing with multiple diseases, inaccurate symptom reporting etc.

This same debate "is it really true AI, or just a big expert system" was going on then. At that time, other debate topics were "What is AI", and "Can computers think" and I stopped following the debates when I saw the topic "Do humans think".

In doing this Medical research, I found myself in Boston at Harvard Medical Library, and found an original copy of a clever manual device a guy made in the 1930's that diagnosed diseases from symptoms. It was a series of "symptoms" cards. On each card (e.g. fever) there were a bunch of circles with disease names, with the same diseases listed on every card in the same place. Each symptom card had holes punched out, if the symptom was present in the disease. So to diagnose your condition, you stacked up the symptom cards that had your symptoms, and then held it up to the light. For the diseases that had your symptoms, you could see right through the stack of cards, so you could quickly see which diseases you might have. SO if you had fever and a rash, you would take out those 2 cards, and whatever diseases you could see through to the light, you might have!

So that was an expert system that pre-dated the computer era!

Have Fun!
Peter Gannon
PG Music Inc.