Background
I was just asked in a tech interview to write an algorithm to traverse an "object" (notice the quotes) where A is equal to B and B is equal to C and A is equal to C.
That's it.  That is all the information I was given.
I asked the interviewer what the goal was but apparently there wasn't one, just "traverse" the "object".
I don't know about anyone else, but this seems like a silly question to me.  I asked again, "am I searching for a value?".  Nope.  Just "traverse" it.
Why would I ever want to endlessly loop through this "object"??  To melt my processor maybe??
The answer according to the interviewer was that I should have written a recursive function.
OK, so why not simply ask me to write a recursive function?  And who would write a recursive function that never ends?
My question:
Is this a valid question to the rest of you and, if so, can you provide a hint as to what I might be missing?  Perhaps I am thinking too hard about solving real world problems.  I have been successfully coding for a long time but this tech interview process makes me feel like I don't know anything.

It's a baffling, invalid interview question.  The interviewer couldn't clearly articulate what it was that he/she was looking for and expected you to read his/her mind instead of responding meaningfully to your appropriate attempts to clarify the statement of the problem.  Consider yourself lucky you didn't get the job.

The meaning of the verb "traverse" operating on a generic "object" is ambiguous, in my opinion.  Start substituting a variety of different nouns for the word object and it quickly becomes obvious that traversal of an object is only meaningful for a small subset of the universe of things that are objects.

It makes sense to "traverse" the nodes of a "binary tree".  It doesn't make sense to "traverse" a "clown".  Yet, an object can just as easily represent a "clown" as it can represent a "binary tree".
