DeepMind team reports new results on the sixth Busy Beaver number via AI-driven discovery
RaiaHadsell · x · 2026-10-23
Google DeepMind's Discovery team, led by student researcher Marco Santos, has made new progress on the sixth Busy Beaver (BB) number — the quest to find the simplest programs that run longest before halting. Because halting is uncomputable, no universal algorithm can solve it, and the BB community has pursued it collaboratively for years. Zoubin Ghahramani and Tom Zahavy highlighted that unlike most AI math systems solving human-generated problems, this work targets a different form of mathematical creativity: discovering hidden problems.
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