Who will survive A Song of Ice and Fire, statistically speaking?

“Who lives? Who dies?” Varys’ Season 2 riddle, which doubled as a pontification on the nature of power, is also a question that can be stated and approached from a mathematical point of view. We’ve already seen superfan BryndenBFish ponder when The Winds of Winter is statistically likely to arrive on bookstore shelves, and now two students at the Olin College of Engineering have explored the Westerosi people’s ultimate chances of survival–at least through the end of the book series.

The students, juniors Erin Price and Bernard Kahle, teamed up with Professor of Computer Science Allen Downey to apply Bayesian survival analysis to the series, using data obtained from the Wiki of Ice and Fire as a starting point. Downey’s blog post features the full breakdown of the report; below are some interesting highlights.

The easiest data to consider is gender, as George R.R. Martin has not really written characters with ambiguous gender into the series. And so it goes that the maxim “the women are the strong ones, truly” holds true statistically as well, as the female characters, though outnumbered by the males, are far more likely to survive than the Y-chromosome-bearing population of Westeros. Along similar lines, fan favorite Arya Stark is an odds-on favorite to survive, while Jon Snow is unfavored to reach the end of the series if he survives his betrayal at the end of A Dance wtih Dragons. (On the flip side, despite his age and fragility, Lord Walder Frey is poised to finish intact, proving that there is no justice in this cold cold world.)

As Downey notes, statistics isn’t everything. Who actually makes it to the last pages of A Dream of Spring is going to be based more on Martin’s plot plans than anything else. But it’s nonetheless intriguing to reflect on how the series has progressed from a different perspective.

• Published on 03/31/2015 at 6:20 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT