a) is exactly what AI is good at. b) is a waste of time: why would you waste your precious time trying to predict a result when you can just get the result and see.

You are stuck in a very low local maximum.

You are me six months ago. You don’t know how it works, so you cannot yet reason about it. Unlike me, you’ve decided “all these other people who say it’s effective are making it up”. Instead ask, how does it work? What am I missing.