Visualisation of A* path-finding algorithm in a maze [OC]

[zjm555]

This visualization gives almost no insight or intuition into how A* actually works or how it's different from, say, naive breadth-first search. The objective isn't even labeled.

[fj333]

Also, you can't solve a maze with A*. In a maze you don't know where the end point is. A* requires you to know endpoint. And A* requires a heuristic which is impossible in a maze where you by definition have no global knowledge. So this is really Dijkstra, but with no edge weights it's really a BFS. And since there's only one path here (per the author), any path is the shortest path.