Step 1: A heuristic is an estimate of how far a state is from the goal. Search methods that use it are called informed search.
Step 2: Depth-First and Breadth-First search are uninformed. They explore blindly using only the structure of the tree, with no goal-distance estimate. Binary search is for sorted arrays, not state-space search.
Step 3: A* uses the evaluation function \( f(n) = g(n) + h(n) \), where \( g(n) \) is the cost so far and \( h(n) \) is the heuristic estimate of the remaining cost to the goal.
Step 4: The heuristic \( h(n) \) is exactly the estimate from the current state to the goal, so A* is the answer.
Correct option: (D).