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The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth. All the more reason to ignore all of that, then, and blog instead about the notorious Busy Beaver function! Because holy moly, what news have I got today. For lovers of this super-rapidly-growing sequence of integers, I’ve honored to announce the biggest Busy Beaver development that there’s been since 1983, when I slept in a crib and you booted up your computer using a 5.25-inch floppy. That was the year when Allen Brady determined that BusyBeaver(4) was equal to 107. (Tibor Radó, who invented the Busy Beaver function in the 1960s, quickly proved with his student Shen Lin that the first three values were 1, 6, and 21 respectively. The fourth value was harder.) Only now, after an additional 41 years, do we know the fifth Busy Beaver value. Today, an international collaboration called bbchallenge is announcing that it’s determi

Shtetl-Optimized >> Blog Archive >> BusyBeaver(5) is now known to be 47,176,870 Shtetl-Optimized The Blog of Scott Aaronson If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel. Also, please read Zvi Mowshowitz's masterpiece on how to fix K-12 education! --> << “Never A Better Time to Visit”: Our Post-October-7 Trip to Israel The Zombie Misconception of Theoretical Computer Science >> BusyBeaver(5) is now known to be 47,176,870 The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re livin

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