The Busy Beaver Problem
A NEW MILLENNIUM ATTACK
Documents and Presentations
Here you will find a list of documents that have been generated as a result of this project:
  • Owen's Master's Thesis on the Busy Beaver Problem [PDF]
  • Busy Beaver Superpaper [PDF] [LaTeX]
       This not yet completed paper summarizes our effort and results
  • Busy Beaver Super Presentation [PPT]
  • Kyle's Tree Normalization presentation [PDF]
  • Owen's Non Halter presentation [PDF] [PPT]
  • Shailesh's Farmer Worker presentation [PPT]
  • Farmer Worker Overview [PDF]
  • Logicizing Holdouts [PPT]
  • Hand Analysis of 98 B5 holdouts [PDF]
  • The Code [TAR.GZ]
Owen's Turing Machine Simulator
This Turing machine simulator, developed by Owen at the start of this project, has proven to be extremely useful in testing and debugging. The program allows a user to "draw" the state diagram for a Turing machine and then run the machine in real-time on a customizable initial input tape. Additional features are also present including the ability to open and save files (all files with a *.tmo extension found on this site can be parsed and opened by this simulator), and also the option to save the execution of a Turing machine over time (the format is identical to the execution format used on the individual champion machine pages in the status section. Feel free to download and play around with it.

Download and Installation

Windows version - OwenTMSimulator.zip
   To run simply unzip to a location of your choice, navigate to the OwenTMSimulator folder, and run TuringMachine.bat

*nix version - OwenTMSimulator.tar.gz
   This file contains the exact same contents as above without the TuringMachine.bat windows batch file. To run, navigate to the OwenTMSimulator folder and type "java TuringMachine.TuringMachineApp"

*Please note: This simulator may not work on older versions of java. Please make sure you are running the most up to date java run time environment.

Source package - TuringMachineApp.tar.gz
   This package contains the source code of the Turing Machine Simulator. It is released under the GPL and you may modify and use it per the terms of that license.

Busy Beaver in a Nut Shell
Consider a binary alphabet Turing Machine which is given an infinite, blank tape as input. If this machine halts, we define its productivity as the number of 1's left on the tape after the machine is run to completion. If it does not halt, the machine is given a productivity value of zero. Now consider all of the binary alphabet Turing Machines that have n states. The machine in this set which has the highest productivity is called a Busy Beaver, and its productivity is the result of the Busy Beaver function BB(n).
Busy Beaver Research Team
Bram van Heuveln
Selmer Bringsjord
Boleslaw Szymanski
Carlos Varela
Kyle Ross
Owen Kellett
Shailesh Kelkar