On Non-Computable Functions (Contained in The Bell System Technical Journal, volume 41, number 3, pp.877-884). - [THE BUSY BEAVER GAME]

N.Y., 1962. Entire issue in wrappers. First publication of Rado's highly influential paper, in which he describes the Busy Beaver Game. The present paper - one of the most important results within theoretical computer science - deals with the existence of non computable functions. "The busy beaver game, originally posed by Rado in 1962, is a problem in which the challenge is to construct a Touring machine on a given number of states and symbols that prints a maximal number of ones, or alternatively executes a maximal number left/right shifts, and subsequently halts. Although the problem is simple to state and its solutions are finite and well-defined, determination of actual values are readily shown to be non-computable." (Teuscher, Proceedings of the 2005 Workshop on Unconventional Computing, p. 89.).