Eli5: What is the Monte Carlo method?
In: Mathematics
Often probability problems are too complicated to find an exact answer. “What is the chance that a die rolls a 3” is easy, but if you have 100 dice and perform some complicated calculations with their results then it’s getting very difficult. So instead of trying to find an exact answer, you just roll these 100 dice and calculate the result, and repeat that a million times (not with real dice – but with a computer). You’ll get a pretty good idea how likely different outcomes are that way, what the maximum is that you can get, and similar.
All Monte Carlo methods follow that basic idea – instead of calculating everything exactly you use random numbers as input, check what that leads to, and repeat that many times.
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