There was a binary search problem that I gave in my interviews, in the context of test and measurement. So, instead of reading a value of the monotonic curve at some index in an array, you would have to set a power supply to some voltage (independent) then read the resulting value from a volt meter (dependent). So, exact same concept, different way to "index" and retrieve the value.

To help my explanation, I had a plot to show an example monotonic y=x^2 as a blue line and an example target value as a horizontal dotted red line.

One guy I had said something like, "You can start at the left of the image, then go down looking for a blue pixel. If the blue pixel is at the red line, you have found your value".

So, he wanted to search the image of the plot rather than the data behind the plot. I tried to get him to understand that was an example, and that we had the data, and that he would have to do the measurements himself, but it just resulted in a short interview.

I eventually told all the hiring managers that I could help interview again after their screening process was fixed, at which point I learned that they just removed software from the screening process to save time. This was a ~50% software position.

Same org as the dork above...