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For so many problems, the instinctual way do solve it via code is often not the best, or the most efficiant.
Kudos may have been set a problem whose obvious solution involves loops etc... (maybe the obvious solution is a brute force approach) but there is a better,faster way to achieve the goal. The requirement that his solution not use loops may just be a hint, or a way to force the student to think past teh obvious solution.
Of course, until we have the exact assignement in front of us, the above is just guesswork.
When i was at uni, we had a class which was all problem solving. We had teams of four, a pc each and whiteboards etc.... Often, if the problem allowed us to, we would get one of the team to brute force the answer, and the rest of the team would try to work it out properly, we'd have a race. All the problems given to us sounded stupid and annoying, but all turned out to be beneficial, and i learnt more about computing and problem solving in that class than i ever did in all my other classes.
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