We describe and motivate a proposed new approach to lowerbounding the circuit complexity of boolean functions, based on a new formalization of patterns as elements of a special basis of the vector space of all truth table properties. We prove that a pattern basis with certain properties would lead to a useful complexity formula of a specific form, and speculate on how to find such a basis. This formula might take as long to compute on arbitrary functions as a brute-force search among circuits, thus addressing the natural proofs barrier, but has a form amenable to proving lower bounds for well-understood explicit functions.
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