I do not know how many regular hexagons can be constructed with their corners on the vertices of a 17^3 cubic lattice, but I do know that the question makes sense and that the answer is a non-negative integer. The majority of people (present company excepted) wouldn't even understand the prompt, but it's definitely not nonsense — which is very different from one that presupposes that there are colourless green ideas and furiously sleeping ideas.
But I guess what you're actually getting at is: Doesn't it just say ‘yo be real’ to express ‘I don't know’, and therefore isn't actually detecting nonsense? I don't know, but the question is sensible ;) The data Arram presented in the article seems pretty much consistent with this interpretation.
I mean, things we don't know are basically nonsense until proven otherwise.