How long can a Turing machine program run when started on the blank tape before the tape becomes blank again? Of course, this will depend on the length of the program – how many states and colors it has. Even given these parameters, it is logically impossible to calculate how long a self-cleaning Turing machine can run. Any values that can be known have to be discovered empirically.| Something Something Programming
The classic Busy Beaver game asks how long an n-state k-color Turing machine program can run before executing a halt instruction. The phrase “executing a halt instruction” is not normally used in stating the problem; instead, people just say “halting”. But executing a halt instruction is just one way for a program to signal that it is finished. From the point of view of a programmer trying to maximize machine steps, it’s about the worst termination signal possible because it require...| 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