ver 0.1 date: 2017-08-16
People search for the question why. It they want to spec out things. Specing things out simplifies things. It reduces the amount of information you need to understand something. The search for reasons why is a compression algorithm.
When one finds the reasons why, what is foggy becomes clear, and they become happy. The clarity comes from being able to fit the whole thing in their head, and it is like reaching the top of a mountain, now being able to see far in every direction from a single vantage point.
Compression is not enough, however. You need to get the details back from the reasons. In other words, decompression, in other words, deduction as opposed to abduction.
These compression/decompresion, abduction/deduction, why/therefore, are all different words for the same basic human imperative.
My childhood friend used to say, “Why ask why?”. Now I have an answer – we do it to fit things in our heads. However, I know what he would have said next – “Why do we fit things in our heads?”. I’ll just cut to the chase here, the power of reason is limited. The path you trace when you successively ask for reasons ends in a place that is under-constrained.
To abduce the reason for some initial set of statements, one guesses the reasons and tries to prove the initial statements. The first part is a heuristic, and the second part is amenable to the concepts in automated theorem proving. There is research on abduction, maybe I will write about it more in the future.
Pentesting usually involves a complicated system and you want to abduce the spec, so you guess a spec and then you also need to strategems for adbuction.