A Monte Carlo simulation is named such because of its use in gambling. Before gambling became a near scientific practice designed to take money from suckers, the first casinos had no idea how to set bet limits, what a minimum bet should be, etc. In order to discover the odds that any given person had of winning a given casino game, the people behind the curtain would simply play the game until all possibilities had been exhausted or the necessary degree of precision had been obtained for the statistics of any given game. Thus, in modern parlance, a Monte Carlo Simulation is any simulation which derives its results from brute force computation and which returns a value dependent upon the interpretation of the total, sum data. In that definition, flipping a coin one hundred times to find the ratio of heads to tails is a Monte Carlo Simulation, but brute forcing password is not, because the only result obtained was the password and that had nothing to do, statistically, with the rest of the data set (the hundreds of passwords previously guessed). If the sought data was the ratio of false passwords to correct ones, well, that would fall under my definition of a Monte Carlo Simulation.