3n+1 Ep68: What do Busy Beavers compute?

Question: Which computer program of size n runs the longest before stopping? (Programs that run forever are disqualified.) Such a program is called a Busy Beaver of size n. Researchers have been able to locate small-sized Busy Beavers and, surprisingly, they turn out to compute 3n+1-like sequences. Are 3n+1 rules a good way to burn Turing Machine cycles? #collatz References: "The Busy Beaver Frontier" (Scott Aaronson, 2020) and "The Busy Beaver Competition: a historical survey" (Pascal Michel, 2022).