Algorithm for solving the "Unblock Me" puzzles

Question

"Unblock Me" is an iPhone game (screenshot here: http://www.kiragames.com/games/unblockme-free.) I was wondering how would one go about solving this programmatically and what class of algorithms help out here.

Has anyone cracked this?

Answer 1

It's just a graph search with nodes being board state and edges being valid moves. If you can think of a good heuristic then you could use a slightly smarter graph search like A*

Answer 2

The more familiar name of this game is "Rush Hour":

http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22rush+hour%22+puzzle+algorithm

Answer 3

I'm afraid you have no other option than brute force search. Although with best-first search, using a clever heuristic and eliminating repeated states, I imagine the search space is not that big.