TMBR: September 2026
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This edition of TMBR is in progress and has not yet been released. Please add any notes you think may be relevant (including in the form a of a TODO with a link to any relevant Discord discussion).
Blog Posts
- September 1, 2026. Nick Drozd. A Tetrational Self-Cleaning Turing Machine.
Champions
- On September 1, nickdrozd discovered a new BLB(3,3) champion which runs for over 10↑↑6.54 steps before blanking the tape.[1] Note that this is not a new BBB(3,3) champion.
- On September 9, @-d discovered a new BBf(24) champion which runs for over 9.000 × 1014,448 steps.[2]
BB Adjacent
TODO: Cellular Automata Busy Beaver (version 2)
- General Recursive Function
- On September 5, after Shawn Ligocki renewed interest in a certain chaotic BBµ(16) holdout last month, sheep devised a method to accelerate the simulation of the holdout.[8] This allowed her to confirm that, if the holdout returned a value, it would be larger than 3.124 × 1016.[9]
- On September 7, the aforementioned method was ported to Rust by @ZTS439, allowing them to extend the bound to 4.999 × 1017.[10]
TODO: PLUSMINUS[11]
- Fractran
- On September 13, @-d completed enumeration of BBf(24), leaving an initial 6,733,785 holdouts, which were reduced to 231,432 holdouts, or 10,838 holdouts if ai-created deciders are used.[12]
TODO: Post Tag System (alternate definition)
- Register Machine
- On September 18, @mineralli discovered a new MBB(9) champion.[13] sheep then discovered four new champions for MBB(9) in the four following days.[14]
- On September 25, sheep discovered an MBB(10) champion,[15] which was shown to halt in around 102,629,437 steps by Shawn Ligocki.[16] This champion prompted a rework of Ligocki's hydra-like rule accelerator.[17]
- On September 29, @mineralli discovered a 5-register, 19-state machine which halts iff the Erdős ternary conjecture is false.
Holdouts
- BB(6)
- By September 4, mxdys solved all 16 Counter Class 1 TMs.[18]
- On September 4, Discord user fifi_49513 claimed to have proven a TM non-halting. [19] This machine was later confirmed non-halting in Rocq on September 5 by mxdys. [20]
- On September 8, mxdys released a new holdouts list of 964 machines up to equivalence.[21]
- On September 14, an independent computation by Seiji extended the Space Needle trajectory to 100,000,000 terms: no power of 2 was ever encountered, and the most factors of 2 any term had was 25 (first occurring at n = 23,145,881; the previously documented state was >17,000,000 terms with max 24). The full final value (94,125,050 bits) is published with SHA-256 anchors, together with 400 checkpoints cross-verified by two independent implementations, and exact macro step-count laws of the machine (L0–L4; L1 and L3 formally proven). [22]
- On September 16, mxdys released another holdouts list of 855 machines up to equivalence.[23]
- On September 24, mxdys released another holdouts list of 815 machines up to equivalence.[24] The newly solved holdouts include:
- BMO9
- Two shift-overflow bell counters
- 31 shift-overflow mixed-digits counters with similar behavior
- two new translated cyclers (also shift-overflow mixed-digits counters) with high period
- two other shift-overflow counters
- On September 24, Discord user q64 simulated a TM to halt[25]
- The halting status of
1RB1LA_1RC1RE_1LD0RB_1LA0LC_0RF0RD_0RB---(bbch) was formalized without new axioms by avoiding the use of Baker–Wüstholz theorem. - On September 30, mxdys released another holdouts list of 797 machines up to equivalence.[26]
- BB(2,5)
- BB(2,7)
- Terry Ligocki enumerated 31K more subtasks, increasing the number of holdouts to 3,062,427,379. A total of 980K subtasks out of the 1 million subtasks (or 98%) have been enumerated.
Misc
- On September 2, RobinCodes began work on updating the BB(6) holdout spreadsheet.[29]
- On September 5, XnoobSpeakable began an opt-in archival project of the bbchallenge Discord server.[30]
- On September 23, Joseph M. Shunia published a preprint presenting a 120-state TM that halts iff Riemann hypothesis is false.[31]
- Twitter user @_Mira___Mira_ claimed to have found a TKTK-state TM <TKTK update when final TM is published> whose halting status is independent of ZFC with GPT-6 Astra.