Bibliography on the Busy Beaver Problem

In 1981 the editor of this bibliography was attracted to the Busy Beaver Problem by a reference in the Dutch translation of Ogilvy's Tomorrow's Math [Ogi72]. Tracing back in time one ends of course Rado's publication "On non-computable functions" [Rad62a, Rad62b]. The course of events since then is not always easy to trace. In the period 1962-1989 there were many successive high tides and low tides in the research eorts and in the results thereof. Moreover, researchers sometimes worked in isolation, and were unaware of the results of one another, though it seems most of the researchers involved live in the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America. Literature search via e.g. Science Citation Index and via personal correspondence with some of the researchers in this eld, gradually did result in this list of articles, books, reports and theses. Separately, reviews in Computing Reviews (CR), in the Journal of Symbolic Logic (JSL), in Mathematical Reviews (MR), and in the Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete (Zbl) are listed. A review between brackets contains nothing more than the author's summary. Most of this bibliography was compiled before 1986. Only a few entries have been added haphazardly since then