Related papers: Hardness of busy beaver value BB(15)
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…
We prove nonhalting of the Turing machine dubbed "Skelet #17", known to be one of the toughest 5-state, 2-symbol Turing machines to analyze. Combined with the efforts of The Busy Beaver Challenge, we are therefore able to show that BB(5),…
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 Challenge (or bbchallenge) aims at collaboratively solving the following conjecture: "$S(5) = 47{,}176{,}870$" [Rad\'o, 1962], [Marxen and Buntrock, 1990], [Aaronson, 2020]. This conjecture says that if a 5-state Turing…
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 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…
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…
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…
We establish a lower bound for deciding the satisfiability of the conjunction of any two Boolean formulas from a set called a full representation of Boolean functions of $n$ variables - a set containing a Boolean formula to represent each…
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…
Tibor Rado defined the Busy Beaver Competition in 1962. He used Turing machines to give explicit definitions for some functions that are not computable and grow faster than any computable function. He put forward the problem of computing…
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…
The halting problem for Turing machines is decidable on a set of asymptotic probability one. Specifically, there is a set B of Turing machine programs such that (i) B has asymptotic probability one, so that as the number of states n…
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…
Is there any hope for quantum computing to challenge the Turing barrier, i.e. to solve an undecidable problem, to compute an uncomputable function? According to Feynman's '82 argument, the answer is {\it negative}. This paper re-opens the…
Define the length of a finite presentation of a group $G$ as the sum of lengths of all relators plus the number of generators. How large can be the $k$th Betti number $b_k(G)=$ rank $H_k(G)$ providing that $G$ has length $\leq N$ and…
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,…
We show that, for all reasonable functions $T(n)=o(n\log n)$, we can algorithmically verify whether a given one-tape Turing machine runs in time at most $T(n)$. This is a tight bound on the order of growth for the function $T$ because we…
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…