That sounds like a really fun interview. "Given a bucket of sand, build a machine that computes pi to the nth decimal".
(I'd give people extra credit for coming up with creative and interesting variants based on Buffon's needle, rather than building the full infrastructure to do lithography).
You're not thinking big enough. My usual extension of the argument is to suggest that part of the interview process should be to give the candidate a bucket of sand and some ore, and make them smelt everything and build their own CPU from scratch.
Because, y'know, it's important to cover fundamentals!