A* was created as part of the Shakey project, which had the aim of building a mobile robot that could plan its own actions. Nils Nilsson originally proposed using the Graph … See more

Termination and completeness
On finite graphs with non-negative edge weights A* is guaranteed to terminate and is complete, i.e. it will always find a solution (a path from … See more

The time complexity of A* depends on the heuristic. In the worst case of an unbounded search space, the number of nodes expanded is exponential in the depth of the solution … See more

What sets A* apart from a greedy best-first search algorithm is that it takes the cost/distance already traveled, g(n), into account.
Some common variants of Dijkstra's algorithm can be viewed as a special case of A* where the … See more

A* is an informed search algorithm, or a best-first search, meaning that it is formulated in terms of weighted graphs: starting from a specific starting node of a graph, it aims to find a path to the given goal node having the smallest cost (least distance travelled, … See more

While the admissibility criterion guarantees an optimal solution path, it also means that A* must examine all equally meritorious paths to find the … See more

A* is often used for the common pathfinding problem in applications such as video games, but was originally designed as a … See more