A* (pronounced "A-star") is a graph traversal and pathfinding algorithm that is used in many fields of computer science due to its completeness, optimality, and optimal efficiency. Given a weighted graph, a source node and a goal node, the algorithm finds the shortest path (with respect to the given weights) from source to goal.
One major practical drawback is its space complexity where d is the depth of the shallowest solution (the length of the shortest path from the source node to any given goal node) and b is the branching factor (the maximum number of successors for any given state), as it stores all generated nodes in memory. Thus, in practical travel-routing systems, it is generally outperformed by algorithms that can pre-process the graph to attain better performance, as well as by memory-bounded approaches; however, A* is still the best solution in many cases.
