It's only two days late, but I finally understand the exact solution for last week's Riddler.
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I found a lovely recurrence relation but couldn't torture it enough to make it produce a closed form solution. I ended up using a program to generate a numerical estimate from my equation. Some online digging with that figure told me what the exact solution, but I didn't understand how to get there. Now I do, and I learned a new mathematical concept. Hooray for stubbornness!
I feel better now. I hope the trees will forgive me for killing so many of their brethren in the pursuit.
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