Su suggerimento di @Eugenio Tafazzi.

 

A volte ritornano. Cliccare su Start e poi cliccare su Solitario; due passi indietro molto graditi nel prossimo sistema operativo di Microsoft. Perché i solitari affascinano.
Da Napoleone – che dalle mie parti dà il nome ad un solitario – a Stan Ulam, uno dei matematici a capo del progetto Manhattan (quello della bomba atomica) che sviluppò la versione moderna del metodo Monte Carlo proprio tentando di calcolare le probabilità di riuscita del solitario che era solito giocare.

The first thoughts and attempts I made to practice [the Monte Carlo Method] were suggested by a question which occurred to me in 1946 as I was convalescing from an illness and playing solitaires. The question was what are the chances that a Canfield solitaire laid out with 52 cards will come out successfully? After spending a lot of time trying to estimate them by pure combinatorial calculations, I wondered whether a more practical method than “abstract thinking” might not be to lay it out say one hundred times and simply observe and count the number of successful plays. This was already possible to envisage with the beginning of the new era of fast computers, and I immediately thought of problems of neutron diffusion and other questions of mathematical physics, and more generally how to change processes described by certain differential equations into an equivalent form interpretable as a succession of random operations. Later [in 1946], I described the idea to John von Neumann, and we began to plan actual calculations. (Eckhardt, Roger (1987). “Stan Ulam, John von Neumann, and the Monte Carlo method”)

 

Immagine CC0 di Shlomif da Wikimedia Commons