garak

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A sequence of bit-flips on Cohost's servers, such as those caused by cosmic radiation. There's no evidence of anything more.

Also responsible for @carpediem, find out the secret reason why each day is special.


See if you can guess the next number in the sequence.

0, 1, 4, 6, 13, ...

Can you guess the next number? That's right, it's 4098!

Good job! :eggbug:

You're doing great, you must know the next one, right? Of course you know it's larger than 101010101010101010101010101010 (10 ↑↑ 15), that's easy. It's ok if you don't get the details exactly right, that's a lot of writing.

Good job! :eggbug:

Can you do one more?

That's right, you can't! :eggbug:

The next number is not known, even approximately! But it's real fuckin' big.

These numbers are the Busy Beaver sequence. The Nth number in the sequence is the most "1"s you could write with a N-state Turing machine, without halting.

In general, finding these values means solving the halting problem. This means that the sequence grows more quickly than anything a computer can do! Even the 5th number, 4098, is just a guess, and the rest are wild-ass approximations. The 7th value barely has a lower bound.

Some weird-ass math lets us know that it is literally impossible to compute the value of the value of the 748th number in the sequence. Literally can't be done.


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