This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

On sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek, when a doctor needs to cure a disease, they often ask the computer to simulate complex visualizations or go through databases for potential cures. In real life, ...

At a job interview on Friday, I had to write code, and one of the things that came up when we were talking about implementation of a concept was recursion. The director of the group said to me "Don't ...