That's certainly an interesting approach, but in that case I would want to budget a fair bit of time, and not be attached to coding a solution at all. And agai

That's certainly an interesting approach, but in that case I would want to budget a fair bit of time, and not be attached to coding a solution at all. And again, you want to be aware that you are going to have sharply different experiences depending upon the candidate's familiarity with the basic research. It would be very interesting to walk through a candidate's thinking about this problem "raw," but it would be grossly unfair to ask the same question of an intern who had studied the problem in the last semester. I have seen interview questions along the lines of "reinvent basic research," but they typically pick something obscure-ish to reduce the likelihood that the candidate has seen it before, and such things are usually more of the dreaded "whiteboard your thinking," rather than judging you based on the code produced.