When it comes to determining the fate of our favorite characters, we turn to a variety of different methods including intense discussions with our coworkers, fan fiction, daydreaming and, of course, reading blogs. However, if you have the gift of being adept at mathematics, your knowledge and skill can be utilized to predict what will happen to some of your favorite characters.
Richard Vale, a statistician from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, created a model that determines what can potentially happen to some of the main characters from the ‘Game of Thrones‘ books.
Using a method called Bayesian prediction, Vale was able to put together data to forecast how many chapters will be devoted to a character in the upcoming ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ novels and how likely they are to die. Bayesian prediction essentially uses past trends to predict possible outcomes in the future.
The graphs below predict the probability of how many chapters will be devoted to a character in ‘Winds of Winter’. “0.5” means that there is a 50 percent chance the character will be the main subject of X amount of chapters. “1” means it’s obviously very likely.
Obviously, Vale’s calculations have a couple of flaws, including the potential for new characters or the fact that a character’s fate is pretty much subject to the inclinations of author George R.R. Martin. Vale certainly understands this.
“We could continue to make predictions in the hope of getting one right,” Vale writes, “but there is no merit in this. We hope that it will be possible to review the model’s performance following the publication of [book] six.”
Source: Popular Science
