SCENARIO: It’s 1950, and a brand new Turing machine, the first of its kind, has been installed at a research facility. Lots of people want to use it, but the machine has just one tape. A program’s execution can be affected in undesirable ways by data left over on the tape from a previous program run, and so as a matter of etiquette the convention is adopted among the machine’s users that the tape is to be wiped clean after each use. Rather than cleaning the tape manually after program e...| Something Something Programming
The goal of the Busy Beaver contest is to find n-state k-color Turing machine programs that run for as long as possible before halting. It’s basically an optimization problem: what is the longest finite computation that can squeezed out of a program of a certain length? Or from the flip-side: how much description can be packed into a program of a certain length?| Something Something Programming
The aim of the Busy Beaver game is to find the longest running Turing machine program of n states and k colors. Busy Beaver programs could in principle be written by hand, but nobody has ever succeeded in doing so. Instead, these programs are discovered through exhaustive search. This is done by a two-stage process:| Something Something Programming