Fractran

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Revision as of 20:25, 10 November 2025 by Sligocki (talk | contribs) (Created page with "'''Fractran''' (originally styled FRACTRAN) is an esoteric model of computation invented by John Conway in 1987.<ref>Conway, John H. (1987). "FRACTRAN: A Simple Universal Programming Language for Arithmetic". ''Open Problems in Communication and Computation''. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. pp. 4–26. <nowiki>http://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4808-8_2</nowiki></ref> In this model a program is simply a finite list of fractions, the program state is an integer. For more d...")
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Fractran (originally styled FRACTRAN) is an esoteric model of computation invented by John Conway in 1987.[1] In this model a program is simply a finite list of fractions, the program state is an integer. For more details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN

BB_fractran(n) or BBf(n) is the Busy Beaver function for Fractran programs. Specifically, it is the longest runtime for all halting fractran programs of size n when started with state = 2. In this context we consider the size of a fractran program to be the total number of fractions plus the total number of prime factors (counting multiplicity) of all numerators and denominators of all fractions.

Champions

n BBf(n) Example Champion(s)
1 0 [1/1]
2 1 [1/2]
3 1 [1/2]
4 1 [1/2]
5 2 [3/2, 1/3]
6 3 [9/2, 1/3]
7 4 [27/2, 1/3]
8 5 [81/2, 1/3]
9 6 [243/2, 1/3]
10 7 [729/2, 1/3]
11 10 [27/2, 25/3, 1/5]
12 13 [81/2, 25/3, 1/5]
13 17 [81/2, 125/3, 1/5]
14 21 [243/2, 125/3, 1/5]
15 28 [1/45, 4/5, 3/2, 25/3]
16 53 [1/45, 4/5, 3/2, 125/3]
17 107 [5/6, 49/2, 3/5, 40/7]
18 211 [5/6, 49/2, 3/5, 80/7]
19 ≳ 370 [5/6, 49/2, 3/5, 160/7]

References

  1. Conway, John H. (1987). "FRACTRAN: A Simple Universal Programming Language for Arithmetic". Open Problems in Communication and Computation. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. pp. 4–26. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4808-8_2