date. Lattice QCD Among non-perturbative approaches to QCD, the most well established is lattice QCD. This approach uses a discrete set of spacetime points (called the lattice) to reduce the analytically intractable path integrals of the continuum theory to a very difficult numerical computation that is then carried out on supercomputers like the QCDOC, which was constructed for precisely this purpose. While it is a slow and resource-intensive approach, it has wide applicability, giving insight into parts of the theory inaccessible by other means, in particular into the explicit forces acting between quarks and antiquarks in a meson. However, the numerical sign problem makes it difficult to use lattice methods to study QCD at high density and low temperature (e.g. nuclear matter or the interior of neutron stars). 1/N expansion A well-known approximation scheme, the expansion, starts from the idea that the number of colors is infinite, and makes a series of corrections to account for the fact that it is not. Until now, it has been the source of qualitative insight rather than a method for quantitative predictions. Modern variants include the AdS/CFT approach. Effective theories For specific problems, effective theories may be written down that give qualitatively correct results in certain limits. In the best of cases, these may then be obtained as systematic expansions in some parameters of the QCD Lagrangian. One such effective field theory is chiral perturbation theory or ChiPT, which is the QCD effective theory at low energies. More precisely, it is a low energy expansion based on the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking of QCD, which is an exact symmetry when quark masses are equal to zero, but for the u, d and s quark, which have small mass, it is still a good approximate symmetry. Depending on the number of quarks that are treated as light, one uses either SU(2) ChiPT or SU(3) ChiPT. Other effective theories are heavy quark effective theory (which expands around heavy quark mass near infinity), and soft-collinear effective theory (which expands around large ratios of energy scales). In addition to effective theories, models like the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model and the chiral model are often used when discussing general features. QCD sum rules Based on an Operator product expansion one can derive sets of relations that connect different observables with each other. Experimental tests The notion of quark flavors was prompted by the necessity of explaining the properties of hadrons