The Busy Beaver Competition: a historical survey

Understand

Tibor Rado defined the Busy Beaver Competition in 1962.

• He used Turing machines to give explicit definitions for some functions that are not computable and grow faster than any computable function.
• He put forward the problem of computing the values of these functions on numbers 1, 2, 3, ...
• More and more powerful computers have made possible the computation of lower bounds for these values.