I love this, this is super interesting, but my intuition based on looking at a dozen examples is that the problem is hard, but easy enough that if this problem becomes popular, near-human level results will appear in a year or less, and AGI will not be reached. The problem seems to be finding a generic enough transformation description language with the appropriate operators. And then heuristics to find a very short program (in the information theoretical sense) in this language that produces all the examples for a problem. I would be very surprised if we would not increase the 34% result soon significantly, and I would be surprised if this could be transferred to general intelligence, at least when I think of the topics where I use AI today and where it falls short yet. Basically my intuition is that this will be yet another 'Chess' or 'Go'-like problem in AI. But still a worthwhile research topic, absolutely: the value that could come out of this is well worth the 1M dollars.