If humanity unfolded into a future civilization of infinite space and infinite time, creating descendants and hyperdescendants of unlimitedly growing size, what would be the largest Busy Beaver number ever agreed upon?
Suppose they run a BB evaluator for all of time. They would, indeed, have no way at any point of being certain that the current champion 100-bit program is the actual champion that produces BB(100). However, if they decide to anthropically reason that “for any time t, I am probably alive after time t, even though I have no direct evidence one way or the other once t becomes too large”, then they will believe (with arbitrarily high probability) that the current champion program is the actual champion program, and an arbitrarily high percentage of them will be correct in their belief.
If humanity unfolded into a future civilization of infinite space and infinite time, creating descendants and hyperdescendants of unlimitedly growing size, what would be the largest Busy Beaver number ever agreed upon?
Suppose they run a BB evaluator for all of time. They would, indeed, have no way at any point of being certain that the current champion 100-bit program is the actual champion that produces BB(100). However, if they decide to anthropically reason that “for any time t, I am probably alive after time t, even though I have no direct evidence one way or the other once t becomes too large”, then they will believe (with arbitrarily high probability) that the current champion program is the actual champion program, and an arbitrarily high percentage of them will be correct in their belief.