Amos,

I was being a bit of a devil's advocate, I guess.

I do however get annoyed with trick problems, where language is used to hide one (initially unobvious)possibility, that is then seen as the 'right' answer - especially when the problems involve people. People tend to (always) complicate things.

The only decent illustration of 'thinking outside the box' that I know of is de Bono's original Nine dot problem

Paul

The