Nothing that extreme. This was more of a theoretical thing. Certainly, it could be used to filter people based on their ability to design a maze-solving heuri

Nothing that extreme. This was more of a theoretical thing. Certainly, it could be used to filter people based on their ability to design a maze-solving heuristic, but some constraints would have to be placed on the test, as one can query Google for an A* implementation that could pretty easily solve this without having to understand basic recursive searches. If I were to design this as an interview problem, it would probably be for a general purpose solver and a pair programming exercise.