I think if they operationalized it like that, fine, but I would find the frame “solving the problem” to be a very weird way of referring to that. Usually, when I hear people saying “solving the problem” they have a vague sense of what they are meaning, and have implicitly abstracted away the fact that there are many continuous problems where progress needs to be made and that the problem can only really be reduced, but never solved, unless there is actually a mathematical proof.
I think if they operationalized it like that, fine, but I would find the frame “solving the problem” to be a very weird way of referring to that. Usually, when I hear people saying “solving the problem” they have a vague sense of what they are meaning, and have implicitly abstracted away the fact that there are many continuous problems where progress needs to be made and that the problem can only really be reduced, but never solved, unless there is actually a mathematical proof.