For the record, I just managed to catch a TGV on a 9min correspondance in Mannheim Was yelled at me because I had the audacity to order a coffee 10 minutes before the personnel shift in Erfurt and some of us got locked out of our coach for 15 minutes (ICE door breakdown), but still, what a feat!

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I'm quite optimistic about a TCS that is focused first on asking good questions, and less so on open questions. It will be harder to evaluate what research is good research, and to train our students to ask good questions, but we can see how to do it by looking, e.g., at TE (Theoretical Economics).

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On the other hand, it's hard to evaluate whether a new question is a good question, and posing such questions wouldn't attract headlines in the news. Thus, for the same reason they aren't easy targets for human-executed TCS research, perhaps they aren't easy targets for AI-executed TCS research?

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So far, we haven't seen much evidence that AI is formulating new and interesting mathematical questions, so perhaps there is a future for TCS in research paradigm more like ET with fewer open problems and more focus on developing insight by asking good questions.

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Key diff: (a) grad student training, (b) research funding. TCS students are trained in apprenticeship model ostensibly to solve problems proposed in the grants that fund them. Mostly, TE students aren't funded on grants, don't coauthor w faculty, but are extensively advised on formulating questions.

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