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 '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.
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
> “(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
So funny. I need to make a monthly HOA payment. The bank is about a half mile away. I write a check every month at home, I walk to the bank, see random things in the neighborhood on the way, see a fire truck, see the little toddlers from the Montessori school on a leash with safety vests (always makes me smile), fill out a deposit slip, chat with the teller at the bank during the deposit, get a coffee and sit outside, walk home. What a fun little adventure!
My wife finally convinced me to just do the online, recurring payment every month. I definitely miss the physical act of walking the check to the tiny town bank every month.
I'll drive all the way to the city, to visit a store to buy a pair of pants or something (what I'm buying doesn't matter)
My wife doesn't understand why I don't just buy them online. I know my size, I know the style I want, and I know the company sells em online. But it's not about the item. It's about tossing on a podcast, or seeing something new, or even just getting mad at someone in traffic for cutting me off.
The journey is often more important than the destination
Absolutely agree. I could easily afford to hire a lawn crew to cut my lawn, but I enjoy doing it every weekend or two for similar reasons. I have a little under half an acre to mow, but I still enjoy doing it manually with a push mower.
Gets me outside and moving, accomplishes something tangible, can catch up on a podcast or two or just get lost in my thoughts, often leads to fixing other odds and ends around the house I've put off.
Niceness of lawn mowing is very climate dependent. Around 70 degrees I don’t mind it. Different story when it’s 98.
Unenjoyable, and my electric motor’s batteries die twice as fast in the heat, so I have to do it two days in a row instead of being able to get it over with. But I don’t hate it quite enough to blow hundreds of dollars on extra batteries or to pay someone else to do it.
I once had an electric lawnmower with a cord on it. Swaps one inconvenience for another. You don't have to recharge it, but you have to keep the cord out of the way.
Time to get a Personalized Pico Pal(tm), your own Power Pal in orbit, solar power microwaved to your mower, from now on it's batteries included, thanks to Blazbro!
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.
I love all manner of yard work. My wife says it is like living in an Animal Crossing house, with me always wandering around the yard with various things - shovels, fishing rods, buckets, rakes, chainsaws, grass seed, etc.
After a bad day of work I've noticed that driving a manual transmission car helps me from stewing about it as opposed to driving an automatic where my mind can wander more often.
Funny enough the parts of the lawn that are still grass are what force me to go out and mow it before the seed heads start spewing pollen.
Though if you’re allergic to the hay too (curiously, I’m not) you have my sincere sympathies. That said, even if I didn’t have bad grass pollen allergies, I’d still have to keep the grass from getting too big because deer/dog ticks will start to host there, especially with all the critters we have running around.
Most of my yard (not tiny, but not big either) is clover/legumes now, and I only mow it once it’s seeded and matured, to encourage a new flush of flowers for the bees/flies/beetles and such. As a bonus the clover tends to push out the catsear too.
I’m also fond of my mint patch, and all the little mint moths fluttering about it.
It’s all parts of the grass, and most trees, plus myriad other things. My legs always itch if I walk outside in nature wearing shorts. When I did the test where they poke you with a box of allergens on the back, my entire back was basically reacting.
I am currently doing weekly shots in an attempt to fix the issue.
Fun fact: people are not "allergic" to pollen, they are having a legitimate immune reaction to pollen deploying enzymes that cut up proteins in your respiratory tract. This is because pollen is "designed" to chop up similar proteins when it lands on a flower.
The 100F time is already the late afternoon/early evening. Am I supposed to mow in the dark when its 98F? Or should I wait until 1 AM to mow? I'm sure my neighbors will love it.
At least with the extreme heat the grass doesn't grow quite as fast.
It's not enjoyable in 80+ with RH 60%+ either. Grass grows pretty well. Too well actually but mowing it stinks.
In the morning the grass is still wet and sticky. By the time you can mow it properly, the sun is blaring down on top of this. The afternoon time is worst as things have heated up considerably. When the sun is out of the way, the mosquitos come out and make it even more unenjoyable.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
Plus, when mowing a lawn, you often want to leave a nice pattern, so you cant just go for pure efficiency.