The popular TV series “Game of Thrones” resumes its bloodbath this Sunday, and Tommen Baratheon is going to die next.
At least according to an algorithm designed to calculate the likelihood of each character’s death.
A team of self-proclaimed “machine learning nerds” from the Technical University of Munich scraped data from “A Wiki of Ice and Fire,” a collaborative online encyclopedia dedicated to the book series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which the shows are based on.
The group then performed some algorithmic gymnastics to compile the chances of death for each of the inhabitants of George R. R. Martin’s medieval fantasy world.
“Essentially, what you do is, you mine the data, you learn from similarities in the data you get,” bioinformatics professor Burkhard Rost, who is involved in the project, told CTV News Channel Friday. “And you see what is the common theme between characters -- what’s common between characters that die.”
While the group doesn’t have their hands on the actual scripts for the show’s upcoming sixth season, they’ve calculated the chance of eventual death for each of the many, many characters.
“The character that is most in danger, according to our predictions, is Tommen Baratheon, the current king,” said Ph.D. student Tatyana Goldberg. “Due to many parameters, including his very young age, he appears to be a very easy victim.”
The group’s computations predict several main characters are almost certainly going to die at some point – including Daenerys Targaryen, arguably the show’s most important character. Here are the top-five most-doomed souls:
- Tommen Baratheon (97%)
- Stannis Baratheon (96%)
- Daenerys Targaryen (96%)
- Davos Seaworth (91%)
- Petyr Baelish (91%)
Interestingly, the program has also predicted that one of the show’s presumably dead characters is actually still alive.
“For Jon Snow, it predicted a likelihood of death of only 11 per cent, which is very, very low,” said Goldberg. “According to our algorithm, Jon Snow is actually alive.”
Goldberg said the ambiguity of Snow’s demise at the end of the fifth season coupled with the possibility of resurrection makes it likely that the former Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch will actually reappear this season.
The group also has a wealth of other data and statistics compiled from the series. Interested fans can also track the path each character has travelled so far in the series, as well as Twitter sentiment over the past five years as the show has aired on the group’s website.
