heuristic search in the example shown here we did not do better than hill climbing of coursethat is only this example in general hill climbing may do worse than best first it all depends on the order that locations are searched in the search space howeverneither hill climbing or best first found the optimal solution like breadth first search they both got stuck heading into the long path in the middle of the maze asearch wouldn' it be nice to be able to give up on some paths if they seem too longthat' the idea behind the aalgorithm in this searchthe next choices are sorted by their estimate of the distance to the goal (the manhattan distance in our maze examplesand the distance of the path so far the effect of this is that paths are abandoned (for while anywayif they appear to be taking too long to reach the goal aexample in fig the same path is first attempted by going down and to the right until step at the bottom of the maze is reached then that path is abandoned because the length of the path plus the manhattan distance at step in red is better than taking another step (step at the bottom of the maze again the search goes down and to the right eventually filling the same region from fig at this point the search continues across the top to step where it again goes down to step at which point step in red looks better than taking step to the left the search gives up on the blue path at step and then proceeds to the goal from red step fig -star search of maze this copy belongs to 'acha