Eli, you propose this number of bits metric as a way "to quantify the power of a mind". Surely then, something with a very high value in your metric should be a "powerful mind"?

It's easy to come up with a wide range of optimisation problems, as Phil Goetz did above, where a very simple algorithm on very modest hardware would achieve massive scores with respect to your mind power metric. And yet, this is clearly not a "powerful mind" in any reasonable sense.