Busy Beaver puts another one on the Turing Machine’s tape.

(image from a book “the new turing omnibus“)

The busy beaver problem is a fun theoretical computer science problem to know. Intuitively, the problem is to find the smallest program that outputs as many data as possible and eventually halts. More formally it goes like this — given an n-state Turing Machine with a two symbol alphabet {0, 1}, what is the maximum number of 1s that the machine may print on an initially blank tape (0-filled) before halting?

It turns out that this problem can’t be solved. For a small number of states it can be reasoned about, but it can’t be solved in general. Theorists call such problems non-computable.

Currently people have managed to solve it for n=1,2,3,4 (for Turing Machines with 1, 2, 3 and 4 states) by reasoning about and running all the possible Turing Machines, but for n ≥ 5 this task has currently been impossible. While most likely it will be solved for n=5, theorists doubt that it shall ever be computed for n=6.

Let’s denote the number of 1s that the busy beaver pu