I'm biased, but this perspective hits a pet peeve for me. These are introductory theory of computation problems - of course they aren't real-life problems! Woul

I'm biased, but this perspective hits a pet peeve for me. These are introductory theory of computation problems - of course they aren't real-life problems! Would we make the same complaint against a mathematics exam on group theory or real analysis? Does a question like "prove that the kernel of a homomorphism is a normal subgroup" show how far academia is from real-life problems? But probably the people responsible for inventing half the technology we use in daily life had to solve that problem at some point and R&D departments would be scared to hire them if they hadn't. Knowledge, especially in mathematics, is not a buffet; it's a pyramid. Wecan't hope for society to build programming languages like Haskell or Rust without teaching people the knowledge base that rests on regular languages and pushdown automata and so on. That said, this is definitely one of the most esoteric topics in an undergrad CS curriculum and many universities are making it optional, for theory-inclined students only.