= Ordinal heuristic comparator
{title2=$\kappa(n,m)=n\iff h^*(n)\le h^*(m)$}
A comparison oracle revealing the ordering of remaining optimal costs without returning their magnitudes. It supplies enough information for <greedy best-first search>. Its ordering alone does not provide the numerical differences needed to compare sums with independently varying accumulated costs. For $g(n)=5$, $g(m)=1$, remaining costs $(1,2)$ and $(1,10)$ have the same pairwise order but give opposite orderings of $g+h^*$.
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