Turing Memes

They really asked the candidate to solve the Halting Problem during an interview! That's like asking someone to divide by zero or find the last digit of pi. The interviewer might as well have said, "Please disprove this fundamental theorem of computer science before lunch." For the uninitiated: The Halting Problem was proven mathematically impossible to solve by Alan Turing in 1936. It's literally asking if you can write a program that can determine whether any arbitrary program will terminate or run forever. Computer scientists have known for decades this is impossible in the general case. The interviewer might as well have asked "Could you quickly build me a perpetual motion machine while you're at it?"