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.
gamerdonkey 1 minutes 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.
paradox460 5 minutes 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
scottyah 11 minutes 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 42 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
jesseb34r 33 minutes 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.
gavinray 26 minutes ago [-]
Semi-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.
deweywsu 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
Brian_K_White 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
b40d-48b2-979e 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
collingreen 58 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
sunrunner 2 minutes ago [-]
> hitting with a (relatively) blunt object in the first place
Well there's your problem right there.
svat 3 minutes ago [-]
This 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.
contubernio 5 minutes ago [-]
There 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.
adregan 36 minutes ago [-]
I 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.
bluGill 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
RebeccaTheDev 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
Though 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!
cyanregiment 25 minutes ago [-]
When I mow lawns I teleport forward 6ft at a time and then a 6x6 square of grass vanishes beneath me.
In the nude.
dgently7 16 minutes ago [-]
have 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"
24 minutes ago [-]
dekhn 30 minutes ago [-]
The author's objective function is incorrect, negating the core claim.
zahlman 27 minutes 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 10 minutes 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 3 minutes ago [-]
Without 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.
CrzyLngPwd 10 minutes ago [-]
Dig that lawn out and start growing food, ffs.
doubled112 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
stronglikedan 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 19:18:51 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Plus, when mowing a lawn, you often want to leave a nice pattern, so you cant just go for pure efficiency.
> 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.
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
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.
Well there's your problem right there.
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.
I have a different definition of optimal to this game.
The less time I spent in Alabama heat, the better.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11119-023-10033-9
There's a life lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure!
In the nude.
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"
Is there supposed to be more content than this?
... 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.
If somebody reports it, the city can and will come tear it out and charge me for the work.
"Ownership" is a funny thing.