A 17-state Beeping Busy Beaver machine that quasihalts iff the Collatz conjecture is false
rickasaurus · x · 2026-10-24
Building on an OpenAI paper implying a Diophantine equation with infinitely many solutions iff Collatz is true, the author found a 17-state Beeping Busy Beaver Turing machine that quasihalts exactly when Collatz is false. It echoes related work on an explicit Diophantine equation whose unsolvability is provably equivalent to Con(ZFC), mapping undecidability questions onto number theory.
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