4 ms·

This 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 'squ

• jesseb34r 2mo ago
  I 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 ago
  You 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 ago
    That’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 ago
      Then the most optimal solution of all is to have a lawn that doesn't need mowing at all.
      • altairprime 2mo ago
        The 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 ago
    It'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 ago
    I 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.
    • madaxe_again 2mo ago
      Oh, you just need to attach a prize draw to the questionnaire. It really boosts response rates with a low CPA.
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• paradox460 2mo ago
  Plus 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 ago
    There is something beautiful about getting hands dirty with actual dirt/earth. Its such a REAL feeling.
    • edoceo 2mo ago
      A 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 ago
        I 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 ago
          To 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 ago
  This 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 ago
    The 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 ago
    I 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 ago
  The lines change mowing so much!
• butlike 2mo ago
  Why 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 ago
      Yes, 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 ago
        Oh, awesome! Good on you leaving their habitat for them.
• fuzzfactor 2mo ago
  With clippings being thrown to the right, I start on the outside and work toward the center generally counter-clockwise.
• toss1 2mo ago
  Exactly 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 ago
    I 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 ago
  Yeah 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 ago
  On 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 ago
  Plus, 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 ago
    swap out to a native plants and polinators garden? chances are that the grass is bot native for you
  • teeray 2mo ago
    My 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  And you also don't get to leave the mower in the middle of the lawn when you're done.