In the name of chance
Se quoi le hasard est-il le nom ?
Résumé
The Arabic word for dice is not only the etymological origin of the French word for chance (hasard), but also directly the origin of probability calculus. The ideas for gambling strategies highlights an intuition for the notion of mathematical expectation, a quantity which, in a game of chance, is expressed as the product of the winnings and their probability of occurrence, summed over all possible winnings. Chance is neither objective, because it is simulated and therefore imperfect, nor effective, in the sense of biologists. It is productive in the sense that it is an irreplaceable computation or optimization tool. It is even prospective as it allows us to tackle problems which, either by their complexity or their dimensional altitude, are inaccessible to any other method known to date.