Trends in Theory

What does research in theoretical computer science actually look like, up close? At a one-day workshop on research opportunities in CS, I used games and puzzles as a way in: how to reason about winning strategies in combinatorial games, how computational complexity puts games into buckets like NP-hard or PSPACE-hard, and how AI approaches try to play them well. Student projects on Two Dots, UNO, Outfolded, and Tetris show how a game sitting on your phone can turn into a research question.