Tibor Rado defined the Busy Beaver Competition in 1962. He used Turing machines to give explicit definitions for some functions that are not computable and grow faster than any computable function. He put forward the problem of computing the values of these functions on numbers 1, 2, 3,.... More and more powerful computers have made possible the computation of lower bounds for these values. In 1988, Brady extended the definitions to functions on two variables. We give a historical survey of these works. The successive record holders in the Busy Beaver Competition are displayed, with their discoverers, the date they were found, and, for some of them, an analysis of their behavior.

The accelerated Turing machine (ATM) is the work-horse of hypercomputation. In certain cases, a machine having run through a countably infinite number of steps is supposed to have decided some interesting question such as the Twin Prime conjecture. One is, however, careful to avoid unnecessary discussion of either the possible actual use by such a machine of an infinite amount of space, or the difficulty (even if only a finite amount of space is used) of defining an outcome for machines acting like Thomson’s lamp. It is the authors ’ impression that insufficient attention has been paid to introducing a clearly defined counterpart for ATMs of the halting/non-halting dichotomy for classical Turing computation. This paper tackles the problem of defining the output, or final message, of a machine which has run for a countably infinite number of steps. Non-standard integers appear quite useful in this regard and we describe several models of computation using filters.

The accelerated Turing machine (ATM) is the work-horse of hypercomputation. In certain cases, a machine having run through a countably infinite number of steps is supposed to have decided some interesting question such as the Twin Prime conjecture. One is, however, careful to avoid unnecessary discussion of either the possible actual use by such a machine of an infinite amount of space, or the difficulty (even if only a finite amount of space is used) of defining an outcome for machines acting like Thomson’s lamp. It is the authors’ impression that insufficient attention has been paid to introducing a clearly defined counterpart for ATMs of the halting/non-halting dichotomy for classical Turing computation. This paper tackles the problem of defining the output, or final message, of a machine which has run for a countably infinite number of steps. Non-standard integers appear quite useful in this regard and we describe several models of computation using filters.