Comment by volkadav
Sorry to focus on just one aspect of your (excellent) post, but do you have recommendations for reading up on A*/SAT beyond wikipedia? I'm mostly self-taught (did about a minor's worth of post-bacc comp sci after getting a chemistry degree) and those just hasn't come up much, e.g. I don't see A* mentioned at a first glance through CLRS and only in passing in Skiena's algorithms book. Thank you!
Not sure. I covered them during my Comp Sci degree in the mid/late 90s. I'm probably not even implementing them properly but whatever I do implement tends to work.
Just checked my copy of TAOCP (Vol 3 - Sorting and Searching) and it doesn't mention A* or SAT.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programmin...
A quick google shows that the newer volumes (Volume 4 fascicles 6 and 7) seem to cover SAT. Links to downloads are on the Wikipedia page above.
Maybe the planned 4C Chapter 7 "Combinatorial searching (continued)" might cover A* searching. Ironically googling "A* search" is tricky.
Hopefully someone else will chip in with a better reference that is somewhere in the middle of Wikipedia's brevity and TAOCP's depth.