Although the Greek philosophers of antiquity discussed necessity and contingency at length, it is perhaps correct to say that there was no mathematical treatment of probability until the latter part of the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth century, when some of the Italian mathematicians attempted to evaluate the chances in certain gambling games, like that of dice. Cardano, as was noted in Section 8-8, wrote a brief gambler's guidebook in which some of the aspects of mathematical probability are involved. But it is generally agreed that the one problem to which can be credited the origin of the science of probability is the so-called problem of the points.