he A* (pronounced A-star) algorithm can be complicated for beginners. While there are many articles on the web that explain A*, most are written for people who understand the basics already. This article is for the true beginner. This article does not try to be the definitive work on the subject. Instead it describes the fundamentals and prepares you to go out and read all of those other materials and understand what they are talking about. Finally, this article is not program-specific. You should be able to adapt what's here to any computer language. As you might expect, however, I have included a link to a sample program at the end of this article. The sample package contains two versions: one in C++ and one in Blitz Basic.