[onikolas]

Fun trivia: Stan Ulam was on sick-leave and was playing solitaire. He came up with the Monte Carlo method while trying to calculate the probability of a successful solitaire game. The method was named after his uncle's favorite place to gamble.

When he got back from sick-leave, he immediately began applying it to his work: calculations leading to the fusion bomb.

I find that little background stories like this help students to get engaged with subject.

[Ntrails]

I've been thinking a bit about hands of solitaire recently as I play it on my phone on the commute to work. It's cool to know that it's an interesting problem to other people as well.

At the same time, you know, I didn't even think to use Monte Carlo let alone design the damned thing...

[zeristor]

As I understand it he got bored of the game itself, and was thinking about it at a higher level.

I've been playing it heavily recently though, and it seems to be so well weighted. Completing games about 10% of the time.

Trying to work out strategies to finish more games.

[Florin_Andrei]

In the computer age, I am used to methods like this using huge numbers of samples to calculate the result.

How was this done before computers?

[infinite8s]

The theoretical validation of these methods drove much of the early development of computing in the 1930s (as a way to compute Monte Carlo estimates.)