Our first computer science semester involved programming recursively. The teacher riled against the fact that we were learning our programming skills on an old DEC-VAX machine. He therefore challenged us to bring the system to its knees using a program of our choice, because he argued it would confront the university directors with the fact that the machine needed replacement with something more modern and stable.
So a co-ed of mine and I set out to program the
n-queens problem, recursively mind you, and gradually increased the value of n. At some point we felt the calculations were taking too long and still in hope that we would finally meet the challenge, we stepped into the teacher's office. Unfortunately the teacher we were supposed to see wasn't there, but his colleague was, who was also less than impressed with our initiative. He told us off by saying that the machine should be used by other people too. The machine was still in use after 2 semesters of computer science classes.