Well, partner, looks like about 70% of our cowboys made it. That’s a whole lot of sharp-shootin’ and straight-ridin’! The other 30%? Maybe they got distracted by a cactus, chased a tumbleweed, or just decided the saloon back home was calling their name.

Let me tell you about simplified trails, partner. A simplified path is one where we’ve cleaned things up by removing any unnecessary loops and backtracking. We’re only left with the most direct route that the cowboy took to reach their target, cutting out the fluff and leaving behind just the essentials.

Below is the distribution of path lengths for the finished cowboy trails. You can toggle between different path types to compare the journey lengths.

Interesting insights ahead, partner! Looks like some trails wander far and wide, much longer than the rest. Maybe those cowboys were out sightseein’, or perhaps they just took the scenic route to soak up the prairie sun. Some of these outlier paths are so long that we had to cut off the graph at 30, but don't let that fool you — the maximum path length actually reached over 400!

When we dig deeper, it seems a couple of cowboys found themselves locked in a duel over the same trail. Time and again, they retraced their steps between the same starting and target articles, each striving to outdo the other.

In the end, these Cowboys demonstrated how revisiting the same path might seem like a clever strategy, but it skews the game’s true spirit.

Let’s take a closer look at how we ensure that only trails are considered that are meaningful for the scoring ahead.

Finished Trails

We refine the completed paths by applying the following criteria:

One Trail Per Cowboy-Target Pair: As we saw, cowboys are smart—they sometimes retrace their steps to learn the best route. However, we only keep one unique trail for each cowboy's attempt at a start-target pair to ensure we aren’t biased by repeated attempts.
Fair Share of Trails: Starting and arrival points should be distributed more uniformly. Trails are limited so that each starting point and target point is limited to 10 to prevent overrepresentation of certain trails.
No Trails to Nowhere: Trails with a distance of 0 are excluded.
Outliers Beware: Using the Interquartile Range (IQR) method, we rope in the good trails and leave out the statistical outlaws. We filter out trails with extreme lengths or durations.

Unfinished Trails

Even incomplete paths can provide valuable insights but need to first be refined as well:

Fair Share of Trails: Just like for finished trails, this allows to prevent biases due to overrepresentation.
Outlier Lengths: Exclude unusually long trails using the IQR method.
Trail Sanity Check: If the simplified trail is shorter than the minimum possible distance, we mark it as implausible and exclude it.