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The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer Program
The Busy Beaver Challenge, a notoriously difficult question in theoretical computer science, is now producing answers so large they're impossible to write out using standard mathematical notation.
“I was lucky, because people in the lab were already complaining about my CPU usage and I had to scale back a bit,” Kropitz wrote in a direct message exchange on the Busy Beaver Challenge Discord server. The Busy Beaver Challenge was founded in 2022 by a computer science graduate student named Tristan Stérin with the express purpose of rigorously proving the true value of BB(5). And there’s a good reason for that: A busy beaver hunter who goes by Racheline has shown that the question of whether Antihydra halts is closely related to a famous unsolved problem in mathematics called the Collatz conjecture.
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