Monte-Carlo Simulations

(eli.thegreenplace.net)

43 points | by ibobev 3 days ago

6 comments

  • _Bruno42 2 minutes ago
    I was working on a retirement planning simulation this week with Opus and it added this simulation into my tool! Had never heard of Monte-Carlo before but was fairly impressed.
  • theOGognf 1 hour ago
    Those interested in this should read about DSMC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_simulation_Monte_Carlo. It’s the same idea for low density gas interactions without having to actually simulate all the particles involved while still getting accurate results. Cool stuff!
  • alexpotato 1 hour ago
    > After running 10 million simulated draws, I got an answer of 0.0323, which matches the real answer very closely.

    If you enjoyed reading about how you can approximate complex statistical values using basic programming, I highly recommend Jake Vanderplas "Statistics for Hackers" [0][1].

    It converts the sometimes hard to grok statistics terms and formulas into some very simple loops and basic operations.

    Can't recommend it enough.

    0 - https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2016/jake-vanderplas-statistics...

    1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq9DzN6mvYA

  • stevenhubertron 15 minutes ago
    I use a Monte-Carlo for my retirement planning. This did a good job of telling me not to trust it but didn't really give me a better option. Anyone have one?
    • Jtsummers 2 minutes ago
      > This did a good job of telling me not to trust it

      What do you mean? The retirement planning with Monte-Carlo gave a better result than the base assumption of 4% returns and 2% inflation. The information MC provides let's you, when taking into account your risk threshold, whether you're satisfied with your savings or not by giving you more realistic odds of how long the money will last.

  • hingler36 1 hour ago
    There's been a lot of interesting work in the last ~decade on improving monte-carlo methods for solving PDEs, the field is really fascinating!

    https://github.com/rohan-sawhney/mcgp-resources

  • positron26 27 minutes ago
    > Can't differentiate the function? Fuck gradients. Here's the entire fucking posterior.

    - Monte Carlo