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   Dan Piponi (dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 23-Jun-2025 14:09:57 JST Dan Piponi

   Dinosaur fights seem impressive but they're just a bunch of matrix multiplications.

   We can model dinsosaur fights from the AD&D Monster Manual (1e, of course) as a Markov chain that you run until they hit one of two clusters of final states: one where one has zero hit points, or the other.

   The matrices were pretty fiddly to get right but I got there in the end in Mathematica.

   I compared the results to two completely independent methods (Monte Carlo simulations in C++ and an experimental Python DSL, all agreed to as many decimal places as you might expect.) so I think I can now reveal the dinosaur league table...