Is that too long or too short? I would like to understand what you mean by this.
I gather that someone with a stronger theoretical CS background than myself would have spent an hour looking at the puzzle, said “Ah, this can be modelled as a graph and solved by applying the Flibblewhiz Heuristic!”, spent another hour coding up a first draft of the solution, and a third hour optimizing and cleaning up the code.
My ego has survived the blow of learning that I am not awesome enough to work for ITA, but I wish I had figured that out sooner.
I was thinking more of all the cool search problems like Strawberry Fields, Traversing the T or Palindromic Pangram, where coming up with some solution is easy, a naive exhaustive search for the optimal solution was not feasible, and where verifying the validity of any heuristics / pruning was not necessarily trivial.