Why some people mow a lawn better than others
This article explores human efficiency in solving coverage path planning problems, such as mowing a lawn. It compares human performance against optimal computer-calculated paths, noting that humans are surprisingly effective at these tasks.
Why it matters
Understanding human spatial problem-solving provides insights into how we approach complex optimization tasks that are traditionally handled by algorithms.
By Russell Samora , Florina Sutanto , Arjun Kakkar , and Sushant Karki
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.
Give it a try. How efficiently can you mow this lawn?
You skipped the game, so here is just the optimal path. Is this what you would’ve done?
A few weeks ago, 30,954 people mowed the same lawn. This is what their paths looked like.
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