A crappy implementation of a busy beaver Turing machine.

A busy beaver is a form of Turing Machine that follows a limited ruleset to obtain a maximum number of steps and eventually halt, as indicated by '1's on the Turing machine's tape. A busy beaver begins in the center of the tape.

A busy beaver has N states (as well as a HALT state), and a table associating non-halt states with symbols read from the tape. A lookup is done with the current state and current tape symbol, resulting in a sequence of operations until a HALT is encountered.

Given a 2-state, 2-symbol busy beaver, the table might look something like this:

Where A and B are the states, 0 and 1 are the tape symbols, and L, R, and H represent left shift, right shift, and halting.

Given the initial blank TM:

. . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . . . 
              ^
         start cell

This beaver would produce the following tape state:

1RB -> 1LA -> 1LB -> 1LA -> 1RB -> 1RH

. . . 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 . . .
              ^
          halt cell

For a total of 6 steps and 4 toggled cells.

Because an optimal busy beaver with more than 5 states has yet to be decided, this implementation only supports 4 or fewer states.

It takes a file as its singlular input, parsing it for the symbol/state table. The parser is extremely rudimentary, and an example 2-2 table might look like this:

1r2 1l1
1l2 1r0

Where the first number is the symbol, and the second is the state index (i.e. 0 => HALT, 1 => 'A', 2 => 'B', etc...). The middle character represents the action (l => 'left', r => 'right'). As such, the table above presents the same busy beaver as the example table.

busybeaver is meant to be C99 compatible, and should build on any system with a C99-compliant compiler.

Just run:

$ git clone https://github.com/woodruffw/busybeaver
$ cd busybeaver
$ make

This will drop the busybeaver executable in the working directory. Then, just run it:

$ ./busybeaver mystatefile.state

IMPORTANT: If your statefile describes a function that loops forever, busybeaver will almost definitely run out of tape space and segfault. Stick to busy beaver functions only (which must have some kind of halt statement.)

You can find some example statefiles in the states directory.

Because this is a crappy busy beaver, all kinds of bad things are bound to happen unless you follow the statefile format exactly. If the program segfaults or does something unexpected, check for the following:

• Extra whitespace in the statefile. Make sure there is none.
• Trailing commas or other symbols.
• Typos.
• Incorrect bounds (e.g. 1r8). These should now be caught, however.

busybeaver is licensed under the MIT License.

For the exact terms, see the LICENSE file.