Tic was utterly confused, he had thought that with two months of advanced study in Olympiad mathematics, his knowledge reserve would suffice, and he would handle Olympiad problems with ease.
But he was stumped right at the first question.
If the sequence had stopped at a few hundred or thousand, he could have gritted his teeth and slowly worked out the result, however, the last number was ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety thousand...
No, there must be a pattern!
Tic quickly realized when back at Yiyeta Harbor, Lynn had once done a power sum game on a chessboard, which was equally complex in computation, but through a magical formula, he streamlined what was originally a complex computational process to something so simplified that an apprentice could work it out after spending some time.