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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Why not mow in a spiral then hit the 4 corners last?

The lines change mowing so much!

With clippings being thrown to the right, I start on the outside and work toward the center generally counter-clockwise.

> 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?

How often did you mow the same grass to have to care about the direction of the previous mow?

I mow my garden between one to two weeks, according to the time of the year and sometimes I stop in June, if it stops raining like in 2022 and this year.

Surprised no one here just does the outside border and spirals in (pinching off and immediately finishing irregular bulges). Looks neat, though more organic than rows, and is naturally motivating, as the second "half" always seems to go much quicker. Spiral the other way next time for evenness.

Absolutely correct. If you always mow in the same direction, the grass always gets pushed in the same way by the lawnmowers blades and it will eventually morph to that direction and lose strength, which appears as grass that doesn't stand straight up, and it looks worse.

I don't usually do the diagonal paths but I do try to go at right angles to the previous mowing each time I mow the lawn (excepting when I can't remember which way I did it last time, but it's usually still visible) or a few narrow areas which really only make sense to mow in one direction.

What if your yard is only crabgrass

You worked for someone better than average, or I worked for someone worse than average, because this sounds like a thoughtful touch and they never told us anything like that.

wat. 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.

It 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.

Yeah 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.

Yeah, I think most people who have a yard wouldn't have played it for fewest moves... I don't know why but this whole piece reminds me of someone that never had to mow their yard, or AI that optimizes for something without carrying the full context or nuance of why we might not have gone with fewest moves optimization.

I'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.

I optimize for the longest continuous lines because it takes less time and effort to mow in that way.

Or be like me and just mulch the clippings

(yes it looks uglier that way - and yes I think of mowing the lawn as a chore)

I 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.

Conversely, 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.

And 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.

This 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.

It 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.

Pretty dangerous to pull a mower.

You 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

Correct, mowing a lawn is not an optimal path problem. It’s a making the lawn look nice problem.

> 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.

I don't mow, winning is by not playing the lawn status game.

Why? 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.

I 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.

Or just eat the grass?

Grass is food. If you don't have animals out there grazing it, that's where you've gone wrong.

You first.

> ... 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.