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Plus, when mowing a lawn, you often want to leave a nice pattern, so you cant just go for pure efficiency.
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
But mowing the lawn is nice. It's like doing a giant coloring page with a big thick marker.
The past couple of years I've lived in a place with no lawn to mow and I miss it.
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.
Not when its >100F and >30%RH and a bright sun in the sky.
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.
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.)
> 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.
I have also played a lot of ChuChu Rocket!
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?
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 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.
I dont think it was "don't hurt the grass while you cut it" or "mow it four times in one sitting".
They don't mean do all those cuts each time you mow. You mow the grass in one direction one day, and then a few days later when it needs cut again, you mow a different pattern.
People like that golf course look and I'd get nice tips for doing it.
- 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.
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.
I have a different definition of optimal to this game.
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 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.
(yes it looks uglier that way - and yes I think of mowing the lawn as a chore)
The less time I spent in Alabama heat, the better.
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.
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.
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.
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
There's a life lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure!
www.flymo.com
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11119-023-10033-9
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"
In the nude.
Mowing a lawn is about creating straight even lines not optimal routes.
If somebody reports it, the city can and will come tear it out and charge me for the work.
"Ownership" is a funny thing.
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.
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.