I don't think it's a matter of impossibility. The current process is simply a local optimum. Most practicing software engineers can pass the trivia quiz. Most time wasters can't, unless they googled for the answer key. The result is a pool of candidates that usually can understand a real interview question an engineer will ask. The system works, at the price of being annoying.
If there's only a single correct answer that the interviewer doesn't understand and an expert might get wrong, it's people who google the answers that have the best chance of passing.
I tend to ask open-ended questions. Let them talk about code, and I can probably figure out whether they're full of shit or not. And a real coding challenge proves better whether someone can code than any code question or whiteboard challenge.
