“In summary, all foreseeable future improvements to computer technology are essentially impotent in the face of these NP problems. The only way that these problems will be easily solved is to find nice polynomial algorithms for them. We will show in the next section why most researchers believe that there are no better algorithms for these problems. It looks as though they will remain problems that cannot be solved in a reasonable amount of time. These problems are not hard because we lack the technology to solve them. Rather they are hard because of the nature of the problems themselves. They are inherently hard and will probably remain on the outer limits of what we can solve.”