Although it is currently unknown whether this is the case, contemporary results provide circumstantial evidence that \(\sc{FACTORIZATION}\) is indeed intractable (see   Section 3.4.1).  Stronger evidence can be adduced for the intractability of conjecture  \(\sc{SAT}\), \(\sc{TSP}\), and \(\sc{INTEGER}\ \sc{PROGRAMMING}\) (and similarly for a great many other problems of practical interest in subjects like logic, graph theory, linear algebra, formal language theory, game theory, and combinatorics). The technical development of complexity theory aims to make such comparisons of  computational difficulty precise and to show that the classification of certain problems as intractable admits to rigorous mathematical analysis.