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Why some people mow a lawn better than others
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- tsizz 2mo agoThough I solved it in 49 moves (yay me), I realized when thinking about efficiency, it didn't take into consideration two important things: 1) all of the turns I was making in order to be most efficient, whereas overlapping a few times would have probably taken less time, and 2) I spent a lot of thinking on the spot, as to what was the most efficient path, rather than moving the mower.. so while I only took 49 moves, the time spent on inaction may have balanced the scales with someone who just kept moving. There's a life lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure!
- cortesoft 2mo agoThis is a very different problem than actual efficiency when mowing a lawn or vacuuming a rub. Turning takes more work and time, and you miss a part of the 'square' when you are turning (the arc of the curve is not a straight line). In addition, vacuums especially have an area at the edge of the machine that is not cleaned as well, which is why you want a bit of overlap in your lines. Plus, when mowing a lawn, you often want to leave a nice pattern, so you cant just go for pure efficiency.
- jesseb34r 2mo agoI was thinking the same thing. When actually mowing a lawn (or similarly, vacuuming a carpet/rug) I tend to optimize for either long lines or rectangular sections where I can easily mow a straight pattern.
- scottyah 2mo agoYou should see how optimal the poster's first dates are! Meet at a location with premade bottles of Soylent while they ask 15 questions. Done in 30min. Optimized away the cost and time "wasted" at restaurants or mini-golf type activities.
- altairprime 2mo agoThat’s rather cruel. Optimizing lawn mowing conserves human and machine fuel/battery, especially on large plots or as professionals or in hot climates. Misapplying optimizations to one’s free time is absolutely in line with your stereotype, but that’s much more a widespread defect of judgment in computer engineers than in mowers.
- antisthenes 2mo agoThen the most optimal solution of all is to have a lawn that doesn't need mowing at all.
- altairprime 2mo agoThe same skills used to mow lawns are also used in more complex settings to e.g. tend to farm fields, where you have to account for product wastage versus turning radius versus machinery operating hours. (Thanks, Farming Simulator!)
- jacobolus 2mo agoIt's a cute little optimization puzzle they made for people to solve, with lawn mowing as a graphical hook to make the problem more approachable and fun. Similarly, my kids have a physical logic puzzle where the theme is putting plastic cats into plastic boxes, but it's not supposed to be training for actually optimizing cat packaging. How is this any more or less valid a use of time vs. mini-golf? (The "real" analogous problems are things like optimizing factories or delivery routes, and the way they are solved is by programming a computer to, but this is a toy version.)
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- wildzzz 2mo agoI just send prospective dates a pre-screening questionaire, my social résumé, and a doordash giftcard. It's really efficient since I don't need to waste my time going on bad dates or even leaving the house. Unfortunately I haven't figured out the best way screen for candidates on the second round because they never return the questionaire.
- paradox460 2mo agoPlus mowing a lawn is meditative Copying another comment I made earlier When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
- sealthedeal 2mo agoThere is something beautiful about getting hands dirty with actual dirt/earth. Its such a REAL feeling.
- edoceo 2mo agoA friend of a friend got sick of tech work. Now she bills out at $70-120/hr doing garden and landscaping work. Not her crew, just her. Solo work on nice houses. Not lawn-mowing, landscaping. Very dirty every day. If I had a job I'd be jealous.
- grebc 2mo agoI bought a real stinker of place to renovate & of course the yard is completely overgrown. Every wo/man and their dog is telling me to knock it down, have a bobcat to clear the yard and start fresh. I enjoy the work of clearing a yard by hand, and slowly cleaning the place up.
- saintfire 2mo agoTo be fair, equipment is pretty enjoyable to run, especially if you aren't burned out of it as a job. I miss running an excavator, all the time.
- gamerdonkey 2mo agoThis is mentioned in the article when discussing a player that found the optimum route: > Sarah also did something that appeared a bit unnatural. Instead of simply continuing straight a few times, she intuitively and preemptively turned in a snake-like pattern. This highlighted a key difference between real-life mowing and our simplified game, an approach that strong mowers exploited. Sarah, an avid gamer, seemed to recognize this strategy immediately.
- Lammy 2mo ago> Sarah, an avid gamer, seemed to recognize this strategy immediately. I have also played a lot of ChuChu Rocket!
- WillAdams 2mo agoThe thing is, one needs to consider more than efficiency, but the overall health and appearance of the lawn --- as noted on _Magnum PI_, it is necessary to vary the cutting so that the lawn does not develop a "grain" where it lays unevenly.
- LocalH 2mo ago> and you miss a part of the 'square' when you are turning (the arc of the curve is not a straight line) This can heavily be mitigated through technique. If you walk straight and just turn? Yeah, the corner is missed. If you explicitly come to a stop and do your best to do a full 90-degree turn before moving? The only curve there is going to come from the shape of the blade, and is almost guaranteed to be a tighter curve than just walking and turning without stopping. Yes, it takes longer. But if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, even if it takes twice as long, no?
- edoceo 2mo agoI do the outside/borders and around the trees first. Then the turning is over the already mowed area.
- cortesoft 2mo ago> Yes, it takes longer. But if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, even if it takes twice as long, no? This is debatable, but either way it is the opposite of the purpose of this article, which is about 'efficiency' in mowing. Also, even if you do it very carefully, and walk a perfect 90 degree turn, you are still going to have an arc. You wont mow the whole 'square' like in the game.
- abighamb 2mo agoThe lines change mowing so much!
- butlike 2mo agoWhy not mow in a spiral then hit the 4 corners last?
- codingdave 2mo ago> you often want to leave a nice pattern Even when it comes to mowing, different people have different goals. I live out in the country, and tall grass means bugs and ticks, so my mowing tries to strike a balance of short grass near the home and the property edges to stop the ticks, medium grass most everything else because we like to let the clover grow, and tall grass, un-mowed for years on some spots, to allow an ecosystem where we still get monarchs and nightly fireflies. Totally understandable if suburban folk have different goals, but either way, 100% agreed that efficiency is a secondary goal at best.
- EdwardDiego 2mo ago> we still get monarchs Genuine question, I thought monarch larvae predominantly feed on milkweeds? Do you get milkweeds occurring naturally in your grass? Or are they feeding on something else?
- codingdave 2mo agoYes, we have patches of milkweed in the un-mowed areas - it was one of the primary reasons were started letting those areas go wild in the first place.
- EdwardDiego 2mo agoOh, awesome! Good on you leaving their habitat for them.
- fuzzfactor 2mo agoWith clippings being thrown to the right, I start on the outside and work toward the center generally counter-clockwise.
- toss1 2mo agoExactly this! They should say more clearly up front what is the definition of efficiency. If they want people to think of a particular metaphor, but there are critical differences, those differences must be clarified up front. It seems the person designing the game/test has never really mowed actual lawns (at least lawns s/he actually cared about). I took the approach of efficiency meaning minimizing turns to save time. Instead their definition of efficiency is fewest moves. Their "optimum" has many more turns than many other paths, so would be far more inefficient use of time (and apparently nevermind that path also lacks the necessary overlap to do a good job of actually mowing a lawn). It was also unclear up front that the squares with rocks/features could not be mowed into, but this is unrealistic, as you need to mow around the feature edges not merely the square nearest them. Overall, it is a less-than-good choice of metaphor for the test, and with the poor explanation of what "efficient" means by his measure, it is not the slightest bit surprising many got different results, "sub-optimal" by the page's standard. It seems the test itself is so sub-optimal so the results are meaningless — ench test-taker's goals were likely significantly different from the goals the test-maker assumed.
- D13Fd 2mo agoI agree. I assumed an optimal path would leave the mower on the outside of the property, to easily return to storage. But the “optimal” solutions in the article leave the mower wedged between three rocks. That seems rather sub-optimal to me.
- freetime2 2mo agoYeah I think lawn mowing is not the best way to get people thinking about efficient pathfinding. I was initially more focused on creating clean lines, and I didn't even realize the goal was to minimize the number of moves until I was half way through the task, and started zig-zagging (yes, I skipped the intro text... my bad). Something like delivering newspapers would be a better problem I think - although I suppose you then you get into optimizations like preferring right-hand turns, etc. I wonder what would be the most simple and intuitive demonstration of the traveling salesman problem.
- somat 2mo agoOn mowing actual grass, I love thinking about the algorithm while mowing. Turning(the reduction thereof)is often the most important part. removing awkward corners for later passes is critical. The other is, if you are like me and don't really have a "lawn" so much as a large yard and a weed season, so just discharge where it lands, is optimizing the discharge path, you don't want to discharge into unmowed grass(it builds up and makes things hard) so the optimal path turns into a spiral, fences also interfere with the discharge, so the optimal spiral is inside out, but you never quite know where the center is so to avoid an awkward edge you go outside in with a reverse path around the fence. and what appear to be inefficient passes(not cutting to full width or doubling a pass) to reduce extra turns into straight lines. There may be a fun idle game in all of this.
- ourmandave 2mo agoPlus, when mowing a lawn, you often want to leave a nice pattern, so you cant just go for pure efficiency. I just want shorter grass asap. Not going to lie on my death bed bemoaning not mowing enough. If it were up to me, my yard would be a prairie restoration tax deduction, but alas, neighbors.
- 8note 2mo agoswap out to a native plants and polinators garden? chances are that the grass is bot native for you
- teeray 2mo agoMy mower wants me to mow counter clockwise when mulching, clockwise when bagging. It gives a better distribution of mulch that way, thus better thatch distribution in the lawn (and less shading), thus a happier lawn overall than when I did stripes.
- sam_dusk 2mo agoI agree anyone who has actually mowed a lawn optimizes for the least turns. E.g go all around the edges at the start and finish by doing the rest with as few turns as possible. Which is also how the vacuum robot does it because the edges are finicky with it bumping around the rest is easy. It is more efficient to turn less for a human at least.
- account42 2mo agoAnd you also don't get to leave the mower in the middle of the lawn when you're done.
- adregan 2mo agoI have a small yard and I'm not optimizing for the fewest moves, I'm optimizing for both the longest continuous lines (because I think they look nicest) and the shortest distance to carry the clippings at the end. I have a different definition of optimal to this game.
- RebeccaTheDev 2mo agoConversely, I once had a very large yard for a suburban home, about a third of an acre. I sectioned my yard into about 5 sections, but I mowed pretty much the same way: whatever lines are longest without stopping. The less time I spent in Alabama heat, the better.
- bluGill 2mo agoI always mow a different path each time because turns and wheels slowly build up damage to the lawn and so I want to spread that out over everything. Push mowers are light enough that this doesn't matter but a rider it does.
- tetha 2mo agoI'm right with you. My dad was a farmer and taught me: First deal with the irregular, annoying parts on the outside. Create rectangles with a long side and turning space on each shorter side. Then deal with each rectangle by going back and forth along the long edge. The turnarounds are also a great place for some wheelbarrows to collect the clippings closest to the Komposthaufen. Hence why I went for the irregular strange part on the lower left first, and then the more regular part on the right. That's the weird rain collection, herb garden, thing we have at the back.
- win311fwg 2mo ago> Then deal with each rectangle by going back and forth along the long edge. I prefer to work in lands after I have cut the headlands. Reduces turning stress on the grass and acknowledges that the machine (the one I own, but the design is common) is optimized for use in one direction.
- psygn89 2mo ago
- dekhn 2mo agoThe author's objective function is incorrect, negating the core claim.
- zahlman 2mo ago> You’ve probably done something like mow a lawn or vacuum a rug hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Some part of your brain works out a route that’s usually good enough to get the job done. People are actually pretty good at this, and better than you’d guess for a problem that is hard for computers. We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we built a lawn and asked people to mow it. Is there supposed to be more content than this? ... If JavaScript is required to view more content than this, why?
- Dylan16807 2mo ago> ... If JavaScript is required to view more content than this, why? By "asked people to mow it" they're talking about the visitors to the site. It's interactive. It's somewhat a mistake not to have "skip to results" in the actual html. On the other hand, it makes sense they want to force people to see the landing page first. And unless they want to add a whole rendered fallback the results page isn't going to be super functional without javascript.
- zahlman 2mo agoWithout JavaScript, there is literally no page text beyond that point until the footer. Thee is no indication that there would be any interactive content. There is also no discussion of what the interactive content demonstrates after it. There are no "results" to which a "skip to results" could skip.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoYeah I know. But "literally no page text" is only missing a couple words. The correct version is super short. The noscript version needs a button and a big box with an X. And even then the button would only be half-functional so I understand skipping it. It mostly just needs a "missing content" warning.
- zahlman 2mo agoI don't follow. The title says "why some people mow a lawn better than others". Presumably, through getting people to play some interactive demo, they got some insight into the answer to that. Why can't they just use text to communicate that insight to me, instead of expecting me to go through the same demo? Why is there not any text after the demo describing the lesson learned? Or before, for that matter?
- gavinray 2mo agoSemi-related: Worked as a landscaper during my youth, one of my first jobs I used to think that the line patterns mowed into grass were a purely aesthetic thing. It turns out, the lines are mowed in a rotation to prevent wearing out the grass and causing damage. First you mow length-wise, then width-wise, then diagonally, finally diagonally in the opposite direction, before cycling through again. Useless information for you today.
- b40d-48b2-979e 2mo agowat. Causing damage to the grass you're hitting with a (relatively) blunt object in the first place? All you did was waste three times the gas.
- sunrunner 2mo ago> hitting with a (relatively) blunt object in the first place Well there's your problem right there.
- gdhkgdhkvff 2mo agoLawn mower blades are meant to be somewhat blunt. Like a butter knife. Too sharp and the blade will chip away on the harder materials.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoI have a battery electric lawnmower. I found I got noticably better battery life after sharpening the blade to a near razor edge. Yes the edge is more fragile but it cuts the grass with much less resistance.
- sunrunner 2mo agoThat I did not know. I still wouldn't stick a finger near one of course.
- AngryData 2mo ago
- cyanregiment 2mo agoWhen I mow lawns I teleport forward 6ft at a time and then a 6x6 square of grass vanishes beneath me. In the nude.
- dgently7 2mo agohave to say i really enjoyed how this was presented. no comment on the results or the premise of are people good at mowing or just good at playing "snake" i would be very curious to see if this same result held up when you also factor things like turn effort or "prioritize the longest straight lines bc they look cool"
- PunchyHamster 2mo agothe article kinda ignores that the direction of mowing matters, optimal path would look shit
- CrzyLngPwd 2mo agoDig that lawn out and start growing food, ffs.
- doubled112 2mo agoI only have a front lawn (townhouse) and I'm not allowed to plant whatever I want in it. If somebody reports it, the city can and will come tear it out and charge me for the work. "Ownership" is a funny thing.
- CrzyLngPwd 2mo agoI can only fell 10% of my trees per year even though I have a felling licence...and why do I need a licence?!
- stronglikedan 2mo agoWhy? My dogs and I get much more enjoyment out of a lawn than we would a garden. I can buy food, but space to play fetch is a premium.
- haunter 2mo agoOr just eat the grass?
- tekla 2mo agoYou first.
- CrzyLngPwd 2mo agoI have 45 acres of grass and woodland (some is growing food), not a lawn in sight lol.
- win311fwg 2mo agoGrass is food. If you don't have animals out there grazing it, that's where you've gone wrong.
- ourmandave 2mo ago
- bob1029 2mo agoThis is a pretty big deal once you scale it up. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11119-023-10033-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11119-023-10033-9
- contubernio 2mo agoThere are a number of bad premises in this article. For example, most people in the world (outside the USA in particular) have never mowed a lawn. I live in a city of 3.5 million and essentially no one has a lawn. When you really mow a lawn terrain matters. Most lawns are not flat. One goes on lines of equal height not up and down a hill. Edges are different than the interior part of the lawn, particularly if they abut flower beds, curbs, etc. Re passing a given spot is sometimes an efficient way to mow it properly. Particularly in dead ends and odd corners. Etc.
- elzbardico 2mo agoLawns are absurdly common in South American homes, at least on the more affluent areas of the cities. The difference is that usually homes in latin america have big fences and gates at front, so lawns are private spaces, and not the private as property but not in the privacy sense as in America.
- svat 2mo agoThis is a really nice presentation of how some people play the authors' lawn-moving game better than others -- a great analysis of the gameplay. But the majority of comments on this HN thread right now are reacting to the title rather than to the article, as if it were about real-life lawn-moving.
- sunrunner 2mo agoAnd not enough people are reacting to the rocks that should just be removed in the first place to make the optimised algorithm a lot simpler. And I thought I was on HN.
- Finnucane 2mo agoThere's a spot where you could just lift up the mower over the rocks to get from one side to the other. Or at least, that's how I would have done, but I have a tiny lawn and a reel mower.
- sunrunner 2mo agoI used to do it as a side wheelie for small enough rocks. Good enough, and made me feel like a pro mower when I was younger.
- firebot 2mo ago100 percent first try. Too easy.
- whalesalad 2mo agoThe optimum path does not take into account row striping :)
- tsizz 2mo agoI'm sure I'm the odd ball, but ever since I was a kid, I liked the diagonal patterns much more than the square lines.. and I'm not just talking about lawns. I would vacuum my room on diagonals.. lol
- quickthrowman 2mo agoProbably the same reason some food delivery people place my bag next to the door instead of in front of the outward opening door where it will tip over, unsure what that reason is but I’d like to know.
- hbn 2mo agoI started doing it and immediately felt like I was optimizing for minimal moves like a video game, rather than what I'd actually do which is not the same strategy. There's a handful of things different - The direction you mow leaves a pattern that I generally try to stay parallel to, and mow alongside, and go for long strips even if I have to do a bit of running over already-mowed parts - I may go diagonal at times - I've never had a yard that's a maze of rocks - If there's a small patch I need to mow around, like a garden, I'll likely do a circle around that and use the edge of that mow line as a new edge I'd bet the vast majority of people who did the game input a series of moves that doesn't reflect that closely to what they'd do in real life.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoIt wasn't even clear how they were going to score it, or if it was said then I didn't see it. I kinda guessed they would score it the way they did - the number of squares you traveled through, but at the same time I was half aware of doing what I would do in real life which is to minimize the number of direction changes, not distance traveled.
- hahahaa 2mo agoYeah not realistic until: * You need to pick up dog poo, dog toys, kids toys and clothes pegs * You need to move the trampoline and mow that part and put it back. * Some of the grass is so thick you need to whipersnap it first.
- m3kw9 2mo agoIt makes like 30 turns as the "best", but if the program ever used a mower, it would want to minimize turns.
- AnodicElegy 2mo agoThat reminded me a lot more of Chip's Challenge than of mowing a lawn. Just missing some blocks to push!
- butlike 2mo agoHear me out: It's a low flying drone with a propeller on the undercarriage as well which is used to cut the grass. Voilá, no wheel lines.
- Crunchified 2mo agoYou mean a flymo. It's more hovercraft than drone, and much older technology. Works reasonably well on non-lumpy lawns - my neighbor had one in the 1980s. www.flymo.com
- dbg31415 2mo agoI hate this game. Mowing a lawn is about creating straight even lines not optimal routes.
- robocat 2mo agoI don't mow, winning is by not playing the lawn status game.
- jvanderbot 2mo agoReminds me of Zachtronics: Take a computationally difficult problem, reduce it to a game, and then score people against each other. Pure genius and nerd snipe marksmanship. Did you know multi-robot exploration pretty much as laid out in Exapunks has loose but well studied bounds on number of agents, bits of information, and exploration steps? For example, one agent with only one pebble cannot explore all graphs? https://josh.vanderhook.info/media/pdf/exapunks-graph.pdf https://josh.vanderhook.info/media/pdf/exapunks-graph.pdf
- raddan 2mo agoThis is exactly the trick one of my colleagues uses to teach Theory of Computation, a notoriously boring subject (for your average CS student). Instead of motivating reductions by blathering on about how knapsack and TSP are the same, let them choose a fun video game and show how it can be solved using integer programming or something. Students have way more fun and end up actually enjoying the proofy parts, because they have actual practical value.
- jvanderbot 2mo agoLove it. I confess I learned how to build constrained ILP/MILP problems by solving equipment loadout optimality for the game Highfleet.
- tamimio 2mo agoMowing the lawn is never about mowing but people wanted to be busy, feel productive for a bit, some exercise, and helping to clear thoughts. For others it might be driving long roads, or doing chores inside the house, cycling, and such. Otherwise, it’s inefficient and useless, the lawn can be replaced with better flowers or even small garden, or simply pave it and save the time and efforts and electricity/water doing a repetitive thing like it, and also spare your neighbors the noise 7am Saturday morning, and if you look at the bigger picture, the process is a total waste, you waste water to grow crops only to waste electricity to mow it later, it provides no useful product or outcome either, no flowers, no food, not even cosmetics like fancy looking garden, plus the maintenance and/or initial installations.
- oblio 2mo ago> or simply pave it Please, no! At least for any kind of suburban environment or denser. Don't contribute to the heat island effect. Just plant some native perennial plants that don't really require maintenance. And for the love of everything sacred in this world, please plant the maximum number of trees your location allows. This world needs more trees.
- _philipalan 2mo agoSeems like the most optimal path would also account for returning the mower to its storage space...
- jannyfer 2mo agoFun article, but this didn't actually answer the "why" question for me...
- crylo 2mo ago> Sarah, an avid gamer, seemed to recognize this strategy immediately. As soon as I read this, I immediately thought of the puzzle in the last gym of the Gen 3 Pokémon games (Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald). It was a big ice platform that cracked after stepping on it once, and backtracking meant falling through the ice and having to start all over again.
- peterabbitcook 2mo agoIt made me think of the “step on all the colored tiles without crossing your path” puzzles in Links Awakening! I wonder how the optimal path changes if turns are penalized as well as steps - in real life turning a lawnmower takes a lot more effort than moving the same spot twice in a straight line.
- secretsatan 2mo agoBetter is subjective here i think, what about laying some nice stripes or diamonds? How do you work in some aesthetics and still stay efficient?
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- ijjtpt 2mo agoIn addition to the obvious things already mentioned, the authors miss a subtle but important point. Regardless of one’s preferences for efficiency, turning, patterns, grooves, etc.. once you are done mowing the lawn you don’t just leave the mower in the yard and go to sleep. Their ‘perfect’ solutions take 11 steps longer than finishing on the right.
- jcalvinowens 2mo agoA lawn mower cuts grass whether you push it forward or pull it backwards: my trick when I was a kid was just to push and pull it back and forth across the lawn without changing the direction it faced at all.
- asdff 2mo agoPretty dangerous to pull a mower.
- jcalvinowens 2mo agoYou stand to the side and pull it with one arm
- EdwardDiego 2mo agoAlso dangerous to push one - that's how I had one bounce backwards after a wheel ended up in a hole in the lawn, onto my foot. Turns out, when you get a lawnmower on top of a steel toed boot, you get a _lot_ of sparks.
- tegiddrone 2mo agoit's Q*bert!
- hahahaa 2mo agoWas hoping this was going to be about a real lawn! Surprising how good the average person is. I got the median 91% eff. Or 5 off.
- calmbonsai 2mo agoWJW. This entire article is assuming there’s a single measure of “success” in this endeavor and the simulation isn’t remotely anything like mowing an actual lawn. I’m usually a huge fan of Pudding, but this completely misses the mark.
- rererereferred 2mo agoBecause once my grandma said "You are doing it wrong, let your brother do it!" And since then I never had to do it again.
- TomK32 2mo agoI had a neighbour once who was quite unhappy about how short their lawnmower cut the grass, I did show them the two adjustment screws to raise the ground clearance...
- johnhamlin 2mo agoYour yard would look like shit if you mowed that optimal path. You want long straight lines
- badgersnake 2mo agoCorrect, mowing a lawn is not an optimal path problem. It’s a making the lawn look nice problem.
- whycombinetor 2mo agoMultiple levels of disappointment here. This is about Hilbert curves, not physical lawn mowing. The participant interviews provide self-reported strategy, but the phrasing "why some people..." implied that there would be some discussion of causative factor beyond that, maybe a correlation between 2d Hilbert curve construction and performance in other more familiar tasks like 3d shape rotation, or measured testosterone levels. Disappointments aside, this reminds me of how engaging the old game Flow Free was!
- sumoboy 2mo agoLandscape companies know time is everything especially when a commercial mower can go 6-10 mph. Every turn slows you down when your flying.
- eek2121 2mo agoDefinitely a regional problem. Also, why are you folks wholesale signing up for text message notifications? If you didn't, ask yourself how they got your number? If you use a site that actually requires a number, give them a Google Voice number. However, here in the U.S. my iPhone immediately tosses these messages into spam. The same with Google Voice. I've not given out my actual phone number to anyone, and if someone requires it, I give them the GV number. If they don't accept that number they don't get my business (I think that has happened like three times in the past decade). General rule of thumb: ignore random messages, calls, and emails. If you have doubts/worries, look up the official number for the company/service and call that.
- NegativeLatency 2mo agoHm, if you dead end on the left you still have to walk back to where you started preseumeably
- abstractspoon 2mo agoIt all boils down to 'care'
- zkmon 2mo agogeez, move those rocks first.
- athulmenon 2mo agoWhile I know this just an experiment and an allegory to a path problem, there quite a few factors that this does not take into context. 1. It doesn't take into consideration the extra effort of turning/changing directions or the added efficiency of forward momentum in a straight line. 2. The cognitive load of keeping track of the sections left in a algorithmic path as opposed to a simple top to down or left to right approach. 3. The lawnmover/vacuum probably has to be returned to storage at the starting point so there's going some backtracking in that case in the optimal solution.
- mikewarot 2mo agoThe people who owned our house before us were really into decorative lawn borders, expensive ferns, etc. They spent so much money on it, that they neglected the mortgage, which is how we got the house cheap. I still haven't managed to get it back to a nice, easy to mow lawn yet. 8(
- Good4boothee 2mo agoI would be more interested in results if test case was one that requires some backtracking, even in optimal solution.
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- xela79 2mo agothey did not end where they started, not even close, so it's not the ideal path, cause now you still need to walk the mower to the shed. and that's why some people are more efficient than others. their ideal path leaves you at the other side of the yard.
- camilin87 2mo agoWhoever wrote this never mowed a lawn before