mightythomas

I work for one of the largest software companies in Seattle. And I can tell you nowadays a lot of companies don't ask these types of questions any more. They tend to ask more practical/job-related person as they are more focused on the quality of the applicant overall instead of the just the intelligence.
As someone mentioned above, the goal may not be to get an exact answer. One question I was asked was "design an alarm clock for a blind person". The goal is to know about how customer focused you are, and what your thought process would be.