BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large

> For those tuning in from home, here BB(6) is the 6th Busy Beaver number, i.e. the maximum number of steps that a 6-state Turing machine with a {0,1} alphanet can take before halting, when run on an initially all-0 input tape.

Oh! Of course! That sure clears things up for this non-expert. This is clearly a hardcore blog for people who have been doing this kind of research for decades. Kind of awesome to stumble upon something so unapologetically dense and jargony and written for a very specific audience!

The definition there is standard undergraduate computer science theory. Maybe not standard for software engineering though.

That should be enough for someone with an undergrad CS education to at least get a sense of what's going on if they haven't encountered the busy beaver problem before.

Is it niche jargon, absolutely, but to say it's only accessible to people who have put in decades is selling yourself short.

Hmm, interesting. It’s been 30 years since my engineering degree (not CS) and I’d have to look up what a Turing machine is. I think I remember one professor briefly mentioned it as “This is something the CS majors care deeply about but nobody else in the industry does.” Where I was, the CS degree was essentially a math degree dressed up in a hoodie.

> This is something the CS majors care deeply about but nobody else in the industry does

Correct, the industry cares a lot more about Software Engineering than Computer Science.

> CS degree was essentially a math degree dressed up in a hoodie.

To a first approximation, that's what it's supposed to be. CS is a field of mathematics. It's not a trade school course.