Uncertainty! I raised a brow and he smiled. In those days, he said, we were working on something called Monte Carlo methods. It’s a way of simulating a whole sequence of events where there’s uncertainty at every stage. So you simulate it by taking random numbers and using them as you play, say, ten thousand games: the first time the random number tells you to go this way, the second time a random number tells you to go that way. And then, when you do this ten thousand times, the average result gives you an indication of what would happen under real conditions. Because you’re averaging over
...more
