Attacking the Busy Beaver 5

Since T. Rado in 1962 defined the busy beaver game several approaches have used computer technology to search busy beavers or even compute special values of Σ. Σ(5) is not yet known. A new approach to the computation of Σ(5) is presented, together with preliminary results, especially Σ(5)≥4098. This approach includes techniques to reduce the number of inspected Turing machines, to accelerate simulation of Turing machines and to decide nontermination of Turing machines.