Busy Beaver

An application that analyses/simulates all possible N-state Turing machines with tape alphabet = {0, 1}, where N is given as command line argument. All TMs are generated, then categorized based on static analysis or their runtime behavior. Finally, a summary of all results is printed. This is related to the Busy Beaver game.

Features:

• Nice output, including histogram
• Fairly fast (on a Ryzen 3600, N=4 with its 11 billion TMs, 5.5 billion deduplicated, runs in roughly half a minute)
• Static analysis: state graph reachability check
• Can detect and categorize ≈97% of non-halting TMs (for N=4)

Potential goals for future development

• [ ] Optimize
• [ ] More smart analysis techniques
• [ ] Print states of certain TMs (e.g. the winning one)
• [ ] Show trace of the winning TM

Note that this is just a hobby project which I don't expect to be useful to anyone. If you are still interested, PRs are always welcome.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option. Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.