Thinking about thinking about.

This is just a short post on some reflection I had today. Dave Ripplinger presented an interesting paper (as yet unpublished) that the IDeA lab is presenting at an upcoming conference (I didn't catch which one). In short, it presented improving wireless performance (goodput) as a mathematically-based optimization problem, and it seemed pretty promising. Made me reflect a little on how we, as computer scientists, sometimes just want to barrel forward without thinking about how we're thinking about the problem. They seem to be getting some real gains in performance by thinking about the problems of wireless routing and interference differently than a network engineer typically would. So often we will come up with a model for certain real-world behavior, but we don't always seem to check and see if there are other, equally valid models that would present us with some more readily visible solution to the problems we aim to solve.