Full State-Space Visualisation of the 8-Puzzle: Feasibility, Design, and Educational Use

ArXi:2604.06186v1 Announce Type: cross Search algorithms are a foundational topic in artificial intelligence education, yet even simple domains can generate large state spaces that challenge learners' ability to form accurate mental models. This paper presents an interactive learning system that nstrates the feasibility of visualising the entire reachable state space of the 8-puzzle (181,440 states), while tightly coupling abstract graph structure with concrete puzzle manipulation.