Are You Good at Mowing Lawns?
I don’t know what sort of neurodiverse bucket this puts me in, but I think a lot about mowing the lawn1 relative to how much time I actually spend mowing lawns (~6-7 hours per year). And so I was completely fascinated by The Pudding’s latest post on optimal lawn mowing paths and “why some people mow a lawn better than others”.
They built several digital lawns for people to mow and recorded all of their moves, how often they paused at certain times, and who mowed an optimal path.
Solving the lawn mowing problem is formally called Coverage Path Planning, and is related to one of the most famous path planning problems in computer science: The Traveling Salesman Problem.
Humans turn out to be pretty good mowers, especially those who take their time and have played some video games (including, one would assume, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Mr. Do!, and any other game where you need to worry about dead-ends).
Sarah, one of the best mowers, spent her attention unevenly on purpose. She had a theory about why.
“The bigger spaces have more cognitive load for you to figure out what the best path is. Whereas the smaller spaces…there are fewer decisions to make.”
She planned the tight, trap-prone sections carefully and winged it on the open ones.
So it’s not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. That’s what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that don’t.
The piece is interactive so you get to try your hand at digital mowing as well.
My actual lawn is very irregularly shaped with a few dead-ends & choke points and an added wrinkle that I can’t blow grass clippings into the flower beds (so I can only go one-way the “wrong way” in those areas). So every time I mow, I’m trying to figure out the optimal path so I don’t end up backtracking too much. I probably end up saving about 45 seconds of actual time but boy is it fun from an intellectual standpoint.
See my post on Tidying Up from more than 20 years ago. ↩
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