Am I the only who stopped reading when the author outlined their question?

How many games of tic tac toe are “valid”? What does valid mean? As usual the problem with hiring software isn’t measuring “talent” “iq” or “personality”. These things are arbitrary, it’s communicating business needs to an engineer and having the engineer build the system based on the needs of said business.

As always the issue is communication, and the author makes it clear despite him thinking long and hard he’s not able to effectively communicate what the interviewer actually wants.

Edit...

Upon reading through the comments and seeing everyone having a different answer, simply proves my point.