questions regarding the use of A* with the 15-square puzzle

Question

I\'m trying to build an A* solver for a 15-square puzzle.

The goal is to re-arrange the tiles so that they appear in their natural positions. You can only sli

Answer 1

Use IDA* instead of A*. You need much less memory. As a heuristics, the "Walking distance" developed by Ken'ichiro Takahashi is much more effective, though using only 25 kB of memory.
Here and here is English translation.