Anyone who did undergrad lab work around 2000ish might throw in some comment about lab view software and the number of times it crashes and loses all your data
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It was a competition sponsored by National Instruments, so the code was supposed to be in LabVIEW. Another person wanted to write it as a C plugin, but I thought that was cheating.
There's A* built into LabVIEW, but it's for completely generic graphs so it takes a lot longer to run. The rewrite brought it from about 10 seconds to compute a path, down to about 0.5 seconds.