A new numerical method for stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs)
of evolutionary type, which is in some sense the infinite dimensional analog of
Milstein's scheme for finite dimensional stochastic ordinary differential
equations (SODEs), is introduced and analyzed in this article. The Milstein
scheme is known to be impressively efficient for scalar one-dimensional SODEs
but only for some special multidimensional SODEs due to difficult simulations
of iterated stochastic integrals in the general multidimensional SODE case.
We consider a possibly degenerate porous media type equation over all of
$\R^d$ with $d = 1$, with monotone discontinuous coefficients with linear
growth and prove a probabilistic representation of its solution in terms of an
associated microscopic diffusion. This equation is motivated by some singular
behaviour arising in complex self-organized critical systems. The main idea
consists in approximating the equation by equations with monotone
non-degenerate coefficients and deriving some new analytical properties of the
solution.