What you are describing is exhaustive search on the state space and is orders of magnitude slower than the randomized algorithm, especially when executed by hum

What you are describing is exhaustive search on the state space and is orders of magnitude slower than the randomized algorithm, especially when executed by humans (which is why I added the qualifier "efficiently"). Also, A* is for finding the shortest path, and the length of the path in this case is irrelevant. In fact the length of all paths is the same.