I don't know—there's a big gap between asking "how do you measure this philosophical-sounding quantity?" and actually coming up with a concrete means of doing so. I could ask here "how do you define consciousness for machines?", but (even if I were the first to do so) it wouldn't be fair to say that I'd anticipated Sharmach's landmark 2098 paper solving the problem.
I think Kolmogorov complexity is spot on comparison, considering programs as proofs, theorems as types in the Curry–Howard isomorphism.
That might not have been parent's point. I see it more as "this is such a natural thing to want" that mathematicians had been thinking about it, even before we could come up with a coherent definition for the concept.
In some ways, this is a good example to avoid making the "fallacy fallacy" - just because someone's argument/reasoning is wrong or incoherent, it doesn't mean the point itself is wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_fallacy
The solution of other similar things like the halting problem, is also a testament to the power of mathematics and formal language, and gives us some hope that this problem (and similar things like consciousness) will be solved in the future.
Re:Hilbert's 24th problem
by tom_scrace on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @09:27AM
(#8197119)
Sharmach! Pah! Everybody knows that it was Wang-Kleetch who solved the problem in 2094. The charlatan Sharmach merely read the pre-publication draft and claimed the work as his own.
It is hard to believe that this nonsense is still being promoted all this time later.
It certainly seems to be asking for proof-relevant mathematics which is funny since my understanding was that Hilbert and Brouwer hated one another
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity