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In programming, a heuristic approach is an approach that gives results that are "good enough" when an exact answer is not necessary. This is seen in the famous Travelling Salesman problem, which tries to map out the shortest distance between many cities. This problem is simple with a few cities, but gets exponentially more difficult as more cities are added. This problem is computationally hard, meaning even a computer would take too long to find the exact solution. An instance using 85,900 "cities" was solved in 2006, but took the equivalent of a computer running 24 hours a day for 136 years. The amount of time and computation power to find this outweighed to result. It would have been better to find a "good" route in a much shorter amount of time.