The aim of this expository paper is to present a nice series of results,
obtained in the papers of Chaitin (1976), Solovay (1975), Calude et al. (1998),
Kucera and Slaman (2001). This joint effort led to a full characterization of
lower semicomputable random reals, both as those that can be expressed as a
"Chaitin Omega" and those that are maximal for the Solovay reducibility. The
original proofs were somewhat involved; in this paper, we present these results
in an elementary way, in particular requiring only basic knowledge of
algorithmic randomness. We add also several simple observations relating lower
semicomputable random reals and busy beaver functions.Comment: 15 page
