We Tried This Viral Lawn-Mowing Efficiency Game. Its ‘Optimal’ Route Isn’t the Best Way to Cut Grass.

2 min readBy now, you might have seen (or your algorithm might have fed you) the part story, part lawn mowing simulation game published by The Pudding and Citizen Codex. Titled “Why Some People Mow a Lawn Better Than Others,” it tasks you with mowing an 8-by-8 area and then scores you on your efficiency, judged by how many times you did—or didn’t—cross your previous route.Lawn mowing is something we do a lot of here, so we were intrigued. A bunch of our staffers tried their hands at the game. Here are our scores.Paul Smith and John Gilpatrick: 100 percentAmber Joglar and Tom Price: 94.2 percentWill Egensteiner and Colin Aylesworth: 92.5 percentSean Abrams: 89.1 percentDavid Dritsas: 87 percentJeff Dengate: 80.3 percentBradley Ford: N/A *He refused to participate on principle. Play Game​Once you complete the game, you can scroll down to see how your path compares to the optimal route through the grid. (There are some rocks to wend around, so it’s not a case of merely going back and forth.)According to The Pudding, “the median person still hit 91 percent efficiency (within five moves).”It’s a fun exercise. But Test Editor Bradley Ford quickly pointed out that, if you were to actually mow a lawn with this layout and take the optimal path, the grass would end up looking terrible. Why?“The random direction changes are designed solely for the reason of not going over the same spot,” he says. “The clippings wouldn’t be distributed evenly; there would be places there would be a lot and places there would be none. The distribution would be random.”That leaves you with random-looking rows and patches of uneven growth as the clippings either mulch into the grass beneath them or kill it because they’re clumped too densely.The two most common mowing strategies are back-and-forth striping or a spiral in. Striping would be the neatest. It’s what you see on baseball fields. “In the real world, you would go back and forth and maintain a uniform distribution of clippings and a uniform appearance of the lawn,” Ford adds. “In truly elegant solutions, form and function are represented in equal parts.”To be fair, this game is more of a math and spatial-reasoning problem than an exercise in actual lawn-mowing proficiency. The goal here is to avoid retracing your steps and overlapping with sections you’ve already mowed. But when you go to cut your grass, doing it well means you’ll occasionally have to.So what’s the actual best path, in terms of grass quality, for the property in this simulation? Start at the top left and head right. Go back and forth horizontally for as long as you can until you hit the top of that section of rocks at the bottom. Then pick the left or right side and go horizontally back and forth down it before backtracking and doing the same on the other side.Practically, this wouldn’t add any meaningful time to your mowing. But your lawn will look nice, like it was cut with care.Some Lawn Mowers We Recommend to Help You Get the Job DoneEgo Power+ 56-Volt 21-Inch Select Cut XP Lawn MowerToro 21-Inch Super Recycler Self-Propelled Lawn MowerBest Electric Mower for Small YardsGreenworks 40-Volt 16-Inch Push Lawn MowerNow 33% OffCraftsman M110 21-Inch Push Lawn MowerWill Egensteiner has been reviewing products for 10 years, testing and writing about everything from climbing gear to video game consoles to cars. He began his career as an intern at Popular Mechanics, then worked as an editor at Outside, spearheading the magazine's gear coverage and biannual Buyer's Guide. Now that he's back, he leads product reviews for PopMech, as well as Runner's World, Best Products, and Biography. His favorite stuff to review is still outdoors equipment, and he can tell you from memory what ePTFE stands for. Brad Ford has spent most of his life using tools to fix, build, or make things. Growing up he worked on a farm, where he learned to weld, repair, and paint equipment. From the farm he went to work at a classic car dealer, repairing and servicing Rolls Royces, Bentleys, and Jaguars. Today, when he's not testing tools or writing for Popular Mechanics, he's busy keeping up with the projects at his old farmhouse in eastern Pennsylvania.