I strongly disagree. For example, in this algorithm, there is "knowledge": the knowledge of the programmer that realizes that following a person moving can mean also follow one of the previous positions of that person (especially if we can revert to follow that person again at some point), and this knowledge is encoded in an algorithm using code, that is, yes, those "if-then statements" you seem to despise.

For years (but even now) Artificial Intelligence meant understanding how intelligent behaviors worked, and then understand what is the sequence of "if-then"s that could express those behaviors in an artificial setting. Use statistical inference is a "hack" (unavoidable, often) to cover the cases in which such behaviors seem to be too complex to be grasped - and then expressed - by one simple and/or comprehensive algorithm, but the (possibly unattainable) ideal would be having everything expressed as "pretty much an if-then statement" indeed.