We’ve found the first five Busy Beaver numbers, but the sixth may be bigger than the number of atoms in the universe.
However, there's a problem with this, which I can't resolve. Anyone who's done a computing machinery course will have heard of the Halting Problem, or Self Applicability, or some variant thereof.
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...
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