raganwald, you'd ask that in an interview? I think it'd be a bit tough. Though I've never had a chance to really grill a candidate -- they usually get nervous with open-ended questions.

I'm kinda notorious for stating that I don't ask questions like this in interviews. My basic feeling is that asking for any working function that computes the average of 100 numbers will eliminate 1990 out of 2000 blind submissions, and you need something (be that an interview question or a conversation or whatever) a lot deeper to differentiate the remaining ten competent people from each other.

But that doesn't mean that you won't run into someone out there asking a question like this.