When you lose a game of solitaire, who beats you? When you win, whom have you conquered?

This question came to mind when I was reading about where the idea for Monte Carlo type modeling came from. Computer modeling using the Monte Carlo simulation is credited to John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and Nicholas Metropolis. They developed it in the 1940s while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on development of the atom bomb. But the core idea first crystallized in Ulam’s mind when he was convalescing from an emergency brain surgery after developing encephalitis. He played solitaire to pass the time as he was recovering. It occurred to him that rather than play out hand after hand, he could use a simulation of 100s of games and simply count the number of successful plays. From that meager beginning grew the entire idea of the Monte Carlo simulation, playing out a rule set over many iterations to calculate the statistical probability of a given outcome. When Ulam returned to work at Los Alamos, he and his colleagues, von Neumann and Metropolis realized that with the ENIAC computer at their disposal, they could use such a simulation to estimate the problem of neutron diffusion in fissionable material.

But when solitaire is reduced to that level of abstraction, why bother to play. Who wins on a winning play, and who is being defeated. Are you playing against God, an active agent who tweaks the cards, or is God/the Universe running like the work of a watchmaker, with no active intervention. Are you simply playing the role, albeit ever so slowly, of the computer running a Monte Carlo simulation? And please tell me that the Jellies that love to play solitaire aren’t put off their game by my admittedly odd thought process.