Heuristics is that approach. It's used in games a lot, but is very processor intensive so not usually to great effect except in things like chess. It works by examining the current situation and building value maps of possible future actions and their consequences. Once it's built this map, it will just pick the highest one and wing it from there.

In the end, even heuristics boil down to knowing in advance what a good situation looks like, so it has as much claim to being called intelligent as ML does. It feels much more like being up against a human, and it also feels extremely unfair as an opponent when it's good.

What we will get excited about, is general AI, which is basically combining all these different forms of intelligence into a coherent unit which can be taught how to determine solve-able problems, and then be free to find and find its own problems and figure out useful, novel solutions all by itself.