As for calculations beyond perturbation theory, the situation improved with the advent of new functional renormalization group methods, in particular the so-called effective average action (a scale dependent version of the effective action). Introduced in 1993 by Christof Wetterich and Tim R Morris for scalar theories, and by Martin Reuter and Christof Wetterich for general gauge theories (on flat Euclidean space), it is similar to a Wilsonian action (coarse grained free energy) and although it is argued to differ at a deeper level, it is in fact related by a Legendre transform. The cutoff scale dependence of this functional is governed by a functional flow equation which, in contrast to earlier attempts, can easily be applied in the presence of local gauge symmetries also.