So, you have familiarity on how to programmatically solve the problem?

Ha, no, in fact the "feature inclusive" comment I made was based on my being impressed Discipulus' code actively can figure out things like the minimum number of moves remaining or even that a solution was impossible based on the random shuffle. My college course's 15 puzzle was, I believe, primarily selected by our professor because he wanted us to use a Windows environment and actually take input from mouse clicks and resolve screen position and current board state for what action to take for changing the appearance on the screen (we hadn't done any sort of GUI yet either). It didn't include any such features beyond those goals (and it was still really difficult for all of us in the class at the time).

I sometimes wish I was back in school, studying the matrix math needed to solve that problem

I often have the, "I wish I was back in school," thought too, and then I remember what school was like and being massively in debt, with no spending cash, living on ramen noodles, in a slum apartment I shared with 2-3 other people every semester, beating my brains out over my course load so I could actually finish an engineering degree in 4 years with a good GPA, and I compare that with my relatively awesome life now and I think twice. :-)

Just a few weeks ago I was trying to use some simple matrix math for what's called Cramer's Rule to solve a linear system of equations for a circuit I was analyzing, only to quickly determine I can no longer correctly do the matrix math I was probably capable of early on in high school... so naturally I just used a computer.

Most people get wiser as they age, or so I'm told, I swear I'm getting dumber every year I get further from school.