Look up something called Warnsdorff's heuristic. I was given the same assignment myself, and this helped quite a bit... I don't see A* being much help to you here...
I've worked on a lot of automata related programs with Python: bottom-up parsers, top-down parsers, cellular automata demonstrations, DFA and NFA abstractions--oh yeah, and regular expressions, which...
I took a look at some of the code you have--pretty interesting stuff you got there. I took a class last semester specifically for operating systems. We got as far as being able to load and run...