Stochastic programming

Imagine you have a big toy box with a lot of toys in it, and you have to choose which toys to play with every day. But there's a catch - your mom has hidden a few extra toys in the box, and you don't know which ones they are or when they'll show up.

Stochastic programming is kind of like trying to figure out the best way to play with your toys, even when you don't know everything that's going to happen. It's a way of making decisions when there's some uncertainty about what will happen in the future.

In more grown-up terms, stochastic programming is a type of mathematical optimization where the parameters or inputs to the problem are uncertain or random. This means we don't have a precise idea of what will happen in the future, but we still need to make good decisions based on what we know.

Stochastic programming tries to take into account this uncertainty and come up with strategies or plans that are robust and can handle different scenarios. This can be really useful in areas like finance or logistics, where there are a lot of variables at play and things can change quickly.

So, just like you have to make decisions about which toys to play with every day, people use stochastic programming to make decisions about all sorts of things in the real world, even when they don't have a crystal ball to see into the future.