The main purpose of this problem was to give the teams a chance to check that they can run a simple Flash application. The easiest way how to solve this task was to play with the application and cross the maze on your own. For the hard data set, you had to use an (almost) optimal path, with no backtracking, but this was still reasonably easy.
Alternately, a simple breadth-first search can be used to find the shortest path through the maze.