Related papers: The Busy Beaver Competition: a historical survey
By introducing the busy beaver competition of Turing machines, in 1962, Rado defined noncomputable functions on positive integers. The study of these functions and variants leads to many mathematical challenges. This article takes up the…
We investigate the Busy Beaver Game introduced by Rado (1962) generalized to non-binary alphabets. Harland (2016) conjectured that activity (number of steps) and productivity (number of non-blank symbols) of candidate machines grow as the…
The idea to find the "maximal number that can be named" can be traced back to Archimedes (see his Psammit). From the viewpoint of computation theory the natural question is "which number can be described by at most n bits"? This question…
The busy beaver problem is a well-known example of a non-computable function. In order to determine a particular value of this function, it is necessary to generate and classify a large number of Turing machines. Previous work on this…
The Busy Beaver value $S(n)$ is the maximum number of steps that an $n$-state 2-symbol Turing machine can perform from the all-zero tape before halting. $S$ was historically introduced by Tibor Rad\'o in 1962 as one of the simplest examples…
In this paper, we extend Busy Beaver function to a class of higher order Busy Beaver functions based on Turing oracle machine. We prove some results about the relation between decidability of number theoretical formula and higher order Busy…
This note introduces a generalization to the setting of infinite-time computation of the busy beaver problem from classical computability theory, and proves some results concerning the growth rate of an associated function. In our view,…
The theoretical existence of Busy Beaver numbers provides a new notion for decidability and corresponding heuristic for conjectures. The minimum number of states in which a conjecture can be modeled gives a classification of what logic…
The busy beaver value BB(n) is the maximum number of steps made by any n-state, 2-symbol deterministic halting Turing machine starting on blank tape. The busy beaver function $n \mapsto \text{BB}(n)$ is uncomputable and, from below, only 4…
Since the definition of the Busy Beaver function by Rado in 1962, an interesting open question has been the smallest value of n for which BB(n) is independent of ZFC set theory. Is this n approximately 10, or closer to 1,000,000, or is it…
The busy beaver is a well-known specific example of a non-computable function. Whilst many aspect of this problem have been investigated, it is not always easy to find thorough and convincing evidence for the claims made about the…
Harvey Friedman gives a comparatively short description of an ``unimaginably large'' number $n(3)$ , beyond, e.g. the values $$ A(7,184)< A({7198},158386) < n(3)$$ of Ackermann's function - but finite. We implement Friedman's combinatorial…
In this article, we will show that uncomputability is a relative property not only of oracle Turing machines, but also of subrecursive classes. We will define the concept of a Turing submachine, and a recursive relative version for the Busy…
We discuss the possibility of constructing a function that validates the definition or not definition of the partial recursive functions of one variable. This is a topic in computability theory, which was first approached by Alan M. Turing…
We show in this article that uncomputability is also a relative property of subrecursive classes built on a recursive relative incompressible function, which acts as a higher-order "yardstick" of irreducible information for the respective…
For a finite binary string $x$ its logical depth $d$ for significance $b$ is the shortest running time of a program for $x$ of length $K(x)+b$. There is another definition of logical depth. We give a new proof that the two versions are…
Recursive analysis was introduced by A. Turing [1936], A. Grzegorczyk [1955], and D. Lacombe [1955]. It is based on a discrete mechanical framework that can be used to model computation over the real numbers. In this context the…
We show some incompleteness results a la Chaitin using the busy beaver functions. Then, with the help of ordinal logics, we show how to obtain a theory in which the values of the busy beaver functions can be provably established and use…
In his seminal paper from 1936, Alan Turing introduced the concept of non-computable real numbers and presented examples based on the algorithmically unsolvable Halting problem. We describe a different, analytically natural mechanism for…
The famous problem of Busy Beavers can be stated as the question on how long a $n$-state Turing machine (using a 2-symbol alphabet or -- in a generalization -- a $m$-symbol alphabet) can run if it is started on the blank tape before it…