The Monte Carlo method was so named because of its similarity to gambling or chance. Hence, the method was named after the famous gambling destination at the time. While the method is extremely powerful, it has been used to describe the atom, quantum mechanics, and the quantity of itself. It is only until fairly recently, within the last 20 years, that it has seen widespread acceptance in everything from engineering to financial analysis. The method itself has now become foundational to many aspects of machine learning and is worth further study for anyone in the AI field.
In the next section, we will see how the Monte Carlo method can be used to solve for .