These types of questions are terrible interviewing techniques. An interviewer who, even jokingly, goes into the room with an interrogative mindset is fundamentally failing at the core purpose of interviewing: finding good talent, preferably relatively undervalued talent. An interviewer should not be looking for someone who mirrors their way of thinking or or their approach to solving a problem. They should be looking for people with skills that complement the team, not duplicate it. Questions like these are typically signs of bad interviewing technique, but not always depending on how they are presented.
More often than not, however, people "design" interview questions to cause problems for prospective employees. You might think this is clever. You might think this helps weed out people who don't possess the ability to think quickly or react to feedback on their feet. All you really are doing is artificially limiting the prospective candidate pool.
Every dork with a chip on their shoulder can manufacture an a question to be unanswerable. Deep down inside what most of these bad interviewers really want is to design a question that creates one of two atmospheres in the interview room: (a) a submissive one, where the candidate is forced to placate the interviewer and reinforce their apparent intellectual superiority; or, (b) a confrontational one where the candidate and interviewer battle it out for dominance as alpha-geek. Either (a) or (b) can be seen as a positive depending on the type of interviewer that goes in. Ultimately, any interviewer that uses this technique is a bad one and any input they make into the hiring process should be seriously discounted.
The interviewer should adapt their interview style to the candidate based on reading their body language, communication skills, and overall demeanor in the interview room. Its the interviewer's responsibility to create the best interview experience possible. Some people are nervous; some don't think on their feet well; most rely on Google heavily to point them in the right direction; lots of them know more than they can demonstrate in the 5 minutes you give them to react to your stupid question.
Your job is find diamonds in the rough. People who are the best, not people who act, think, behave, or answer the way you think they should. Questions like the one in this blog post are tell-tale signs of alpha-geek interview dominance gone wild, and out of that you'll typically only get one style of candidate that makes it through the gauntlet, certainly guaranteeing you're not getting the best talent available.