Students Create Software To Predict Game Of Thrones Deaths
HBO's Game of Thrones series is known for its amazing characters and engrossing storylines, but [...]
HBO's Game of Thrones series is known for its amazing characters and engrossing storylines, but the series is also known for killing people. A lot.
Some enterprising students at the Technical University of Munich got together and decided to design a software program that tries to predict who has the best chance of dying in the show. The software, aptly called A Song of Ice and Data, assigns a percentage to each character based on a number of factors.
"Our motivation for the entire project was basically this: there are many wikis and similar things about Game of Thrones, and we analyzed the date to understand how the world of Game of Thrones would react and what they would do, to find out who's the next to die. Which of the houses are the most dangerous, and that is an unbelievably exciting theme, and that was my motivation to take part in this project."
Via The Guardian, the students went into more detail on just what makes up that final percentage.
"We attempted to calculate 31 factors to see whether they were important or not to predict whether a character would live or die. These factors, for example, how old the character is, who is their father, mother, whether their father or mother is still alive if they're appearing in one book or in another. Finally, we found out that only 24 of these factors were important, and we used those 24 factors in our algorithm and they were important to the calculation."
All that work wouldn't be worth it if they didn't have a guess as to who dies next. "We think it's Tommen Baratheon. He has the highest probability of dying, according to our algorithm."
Game of Thrones season 6 premieres on April 24th.
