> there are many ways in which the question may be unclear and the interviewer is mislead that the applicant can't answer. yeah, when I was interviewed for my

> there are many ways in which the question may be unclear and the interviewer is mislead that the applicant can't answer. yeah, when I was interviewed for my university, they asked me to design an algorithm to work out the n'th term of the fibonnacci sequence. They repeatedly said I didn't need to use recursion or loops. When I finally gave up, they said: well here's one way: f(n) = f(n-1)+f(n-2) I just looked at them and quietly said "well... yeah... I mean... obviously". By that point I was too depressed to say "but that's frickin' recursive, wtf?!?" but that's what I was screaming in my head. Amazingly I still got offered a place. edit: still bugs the crap out of me. Did I mis-hear them? Were they being deliberately misleading? Was it some kind of test to see how I reacted to an impossible problem[1]? Were they really expecting me to come up with some mathematical algorithm to calculate the nth term without recursion or looping? Argh!!! [1]: actually it's not impossible: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BinetsFibonacciNumberFormula.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BinetsFibonacciNumberFormula.ht... but I don't have a background in mathematics and they knew that.