system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What role does automata theory play in computer science?

How does it relate to computer science in a general and day to day sense? I don’t understand what it does. 

Thank you.
gpt
It is used mainly on the theory side. Automata are a good way to describe an algorithm for a computational problem in a mathematical way, which is useful for proving theorems about the algorithms relative to the computational problem. For example, are they guaranteed to finish? What are the bounds on memory? What grammars are needed to solve the problem? Etc.