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cvossyesterday at 1:45 PM3 repliesview on HN

Why is knowing that there are 181 M 5-state machines difficult? Is it not just (read*write*move*(state+halt))^state? About 48^5, modulo "essentially different".


Replies

tsterinyesterday at 2:03 PM

Number of 5-state TMs is 21^10 = 16,679,880,978,201; coming from (1 + writemovestate)^2*state; difference with your formula is that in our model, halting is encoded using undefined transition.

"essentially different" is not a statically-checked property. It is discovered by the enumeration algorithm (Tree Normal Form, see Section 3 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12337); in particular, for each machine, the algorithm needs to know it if will ever reach an undefined transition because if it does it will visit the children of that machine (i.e. all ways to set that reached undefined transition).

Knowing if an undefined transition will be ever reached is not computable, hence knowing the number of enumerated machines is not computable in general and is as hard as solving BB(5).

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dgacmuyesterday at 3:21 PM

Just to directly address this - the key thing wrong in this formula is that it's ^2*state, not ^state. The state transition table operates both on the current state and the input you read from the tape, so for a binary turing machine with 5 states, you have a 10-entry transition table.

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Lercyesterday at 2:26 PM

My intuition is that this would include every 4 state (and fewer) machine that has a fifth state that is never used. For every different configuration of that fifth state I would consider the machine to be essentially the same.