The Busy Beaver Challenge is a collaborative project and there are many ways in which you can contribute to it. Our reproducibility and verifiability statement outlines our philosophy regarding contributions to the Busy Beaver Challenge.
Reaching the goal of the Busy Beaver Challenge requires to decide the behavior of 88,664,064 Turing machines. We hope to do this automatically by writing deciders which are programs that decide if machines halt or not.
You are invited to write deciders in order to further reduce the number of undecided machines in the seed database.
Places to look at if this task interests you:
If you write a decider for the Busy Beaver Challenge we ask that you:
If consensus is reached that your decider is correct, it will be applied to the seed database and used to produce a new version of the undecided machines index file.
As advocated for in our reproducibility and verifiability statement it is very important that deciders are proved correct.
Places to look at if this task interests you:
You can post your proofs on the thread related to the decider that you proved.
We would encourage the use of automatic proving tools such as Lean or Coq although it would be an extremely demanding endeavour.
It is most likely that some machine will be needed to be decided by hand. For instance, see Dan Briggs’ github about Skelet’s machines.
We collect these individual proofs on the forum. Please create a new post in this category for each proof indicating in the title the ID in the seed database of the machine that you are deciding.
To increase trust in the results of the Busy Beaver Challenge it is important for independent reproduction of its results. See our reproducibility and verifiability statement.
This can for instance be done by reproducing deciders or the code that generated the seed database.
Places to look at if this task interests you:
The code that generated the seed database is available here and is discussed on the forum
The forum maintains the list of all applied deciders, you can pick one and try to reproduce it and see if yours decide the same machines
If you reproduce results of the Busy Beaver Challenge please share about your reproduction on the dedicated section of the forum.
This website is also written collaboratively, its code can be improved in many ways!
Pages like /story, /method, /contribute are also collaborative and you can submit changes on github.
If you are interested in the Busy Beaver Challenge please don’t hesitate to talk about it around you and share https://bbchallenge.org.
If you are a teacher and would like to engage with your students on this topic some teaching material (which you can contribute to improve!) is available on the forum.
The goal of the Busy Beaver Challenge can only be achieved collaboratively.
You can help us financially through our Open Collective page: https://opencollective.com/bbchallenge.
Raised funds are used for: