TMBR: September 2025

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This Month in Beaver Research for September 2025.

TODO: BB(5) arXiv released https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12337

TODO: BB(3,3) month.

In the News

14 Sep 2025. Ben Brubaker. Wired. The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer Program.
17 Sep 2025. Hacker News. Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value.
18 Sep 2025. Tuomas Kangasniemi. Tekniikkatalous. Iso matematiikan ongelma ratkesi 63 v jälkeen (Finnish) (English: A big math problem solved after 63 years).

Holdouts

BB(6):
- Andrew Ducharme and @mxdys both found a family of 10 halting TMs independently, all halting in around $10^{69}$ steps.
- @mxdys decided two machines’ fates from the 50 Random Holdouts released in August, making 8/50 machined solved as of this month.
- Andrew Ducharme found a non-halting TM, to which Peacemaker II replied with another machine that turned out to be very similar, and non-halting as well. Later in his search Andrew found another non-halting TM.
- @mxdys published a list of 3171 holdouts. The holdouts are in 1691 equivalence classes by halting status.
BB(7):
- Andrew Ducharme has continued reducing the number of holdouts, from 59,727,905 to 28,189,617 (52.80% reduction).
- Terry Ligocki ran an additional 41 filters/parameters. This reduced the number of holdouts, from 28,189,617 to 23,314,388 TMs (17.29% reduction)
- The overall reduction this month was 72.9%
BB(2,6):
- @Peacemaker II noticed some TMs missing from Andrew Ducharme reductions. It was decided to start back at the original 22,302,296 holdout TMs.
- Andrew Ducharme ran several deciders/filters and reduced the 22,302,296 holdout TMs to 20,358,011 (8.72% reduction).
- Terry Ligocki ran 50 variations of deciders/parameters using @mxdys' C++ code, main.cpp, reducing the holdout count to 970,101 TMs (95.23% reduction)!
- Andrew Ducharme ran some additional deciders reducing the holdout count to 873,469 TMs (9.96% reduction).
BB(4,3):
- Terry Ligocki ran a set of deciders/parameters from @mxdys' code to reduce the number of holdouts which were at 460,916,384 TMs. Six passes have reduced the holdout count to 97,701,052 TMs (78.80% reduction).
BB(3,4):
- TODO: @Xnoob545 and @Lúkos are working on the holdout list for BB(3,4), ~435M TMs, using @mxdys' deciders with various parameters.