I'm not defending the interview question, but it's a valuable trait if someone can take the evidence of a logic-defying test run and ask themselves "This seems

I'm not defending the interview question, but it's a valuable trait if someone can take the evidence of a logic-defying test run and ask themselves "This seems impossible, how could it have come about?" rather than "This is impossible, it must represent a hardware defect." -- or "This is mysterious and impossible but I just perturbed it enough to make the mysterious effect go away." IMO this interview question is not horrible, especially if the answer(s) given are taken as a larger context of evaluating someone. If the candidate the interviewer responded "no, can't evaluate to true", then a good follow up might be "in fact it can! can you think of why/how?"