predictive modeling is a kind of reverse engineering to begin with. Machine learning starts with the data, an encoding of things that have happened, and attempts to uncover patterns that generated or explained the data in the first place. John was attempting to deduce what the other team had deduced. His guide? Informal hunches and ill-informed inferences, each of which could be pursued only by way of trial and error, testing each hypothetical mess-up he could dream up by programming it by hand and comparing it to the retrospective predictions he had been given.
