When a problem seems intractable, it is often a good idea to try to study "toy" versions of it in the hope that as the toys become increasingly larger and more sophisticated, they would metamorphose, in the limit, to the real thing.
Doron ZeilbergerNo Victor, you got it backwards, you should evaluate these integrals non-rigorously if you can, and rigorously if you must.
Doron ZeilbergerConventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is "continuous", and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.
Doron Zeilberger