Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been ...

Programmers normally want to minimize the time their code takes to execute. But in 1962, the Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó posed the opposite problem. He asked: How long can a simple computer ...

The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound questions and concepts in mathematics.