Statistician Creates Mathematical Model To Predict the Future of Game of Thrones 127
KentuckyFC writes One way of predicting the future is to study data about events in the past and build a statistical model that generates the same pattern of data. Statisticians can then use the model to generate data about the future. Now one statistician has taken this art to new heights by predicting the content of the soon-to-be published novels in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R R Martin. The existing five novels are the basis of the hit TV series Game of Thrones. Each chapter in the existing books is told from the point of view of one of the characters. So far, 24 characters have starred in this way. The statistical approach uses the distribution of characters in chapters in the first five books to predict the distribution in the forthcoming novels. The results suggest that several characters will not appear at all and also throw light on whether one important character is dead or not, following an ambiguous story line in the existing novels. However, the model also serves to highlight the shortcomings of purely statistical approaches. For example, it does not "know" that characters who have already been killed off are unlikely to appear in future chapters. Neither does it allow for new characters that might appear. Nevertheless, this statistical approach to literature could introduce the process of mathematical modelling to more people than any textbook.
Hodor (Score:5, Funny)
Hodor hodor hodor. Hodor, hodor hodor hodor hodor Hodor hodor. Hodor.
Re:Hodor (Score:5, Funny)
Hodor hodor hodor. Hodor, hodor hodor hodor hodor Hodor hodor. Hodor.
I am Groot.
EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY!!!!!!
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I will make a prediction: Martin will kill off an important character because he has no idea how to write a character arc out of a wet paper bag. Someone important will die, because there's no way for him to have a character come to a resolution. This is known as "not knowing how to write a story" and instead is just writing a series of events.
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Re: Hodor (Score:2)
Stephen King did the same thing in The Stand. He ended up with too many characters and no actual story arc, so he had to abruptly kill a few off. Even then, the book still had a lame dues ex machina ending, and other major characters (Stu) ended up totally irrelevant at the end.
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I really have to say, deus ex machina endings are one of my personal pet peeves across literature, its the hallmark of lazy uninteresting story telling. In fact, about the only place I was amused to see one was at the end of the one Deus Ex game I played to the end.... and not because I thought it was even particularly good, it wasn't, its just.... its the name of the game, so its at least amusing in that one context.
Endings are hard (Score:2)
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I read your typo as 'douche ex machina', which would be kinda fitting here. Thanks.
Re:Hodor (Score:4, Informative)
As much as I don't want to validate trolling by responding to it: many of Martin's kills are done specifically to play with expectations. We killed the presumptive protagonist (Ned Stark). Then the audience realizes this story is about the sone and his revenge. So we kill him. But at least we know who the villan is. So Joffrey dies.
Martin's work speaks for itself. I'll not feed the "can't write" comments. I'm sure your novels are better. Which movie network is producing them?
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I haven't watched or read the series beyond some individual scenes so I can't say if that's an accurate assesment of it, but if it is, then it's evidence for the granparent's po
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I haven't watched or read the series beyond some individual scenes so I can't say if that's an accurate assesment of it, but if it is, then it's evidence for the granparent's position. "Playing with expectations" is a gimmick. It can work once or perhaps even twice, but if the entire work revolves around it, that strongly suggests the author relies on constant shocks because they have nothing else up their sleeve.
You can rest relieved to know that the plot does not revolve around it. I'm not sure "avoiding cliche and limiting tropes" is realistically a "gimmick".
I'm sure your novels are better.
Just like everyone who complains about Obama/Bush/whatever better have a succesful term or two of US presidency behind them?
I'm not sure the analogy holds. Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be to respond to the presidential critic with "I'm sure your policies are better thought out: where can I find them?".
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This discussion has actually inspired me to write a poem. OK, here it goes:
"Stories don't need plots, and poems don't need to rhyme."
That got me an A+ in my postmodern creative writing class.
Now I'm reminded of all the people who carefully watched every episode of Lost like there was going to be some sort of meaningful ending that could never had been predicted, made total sense once revealed, and made all the hours invested in over-stretched side plots worth enduring.
Fact is there is no "literature". The
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How do you have a story that doesn't have a plot. You could have a one sentence story and it would still have a plot. Not every story has a complicated plot, but a plot is pretty much just a simpler explanation of events.
And as the Anon's have already said, Breaking Bad had a well done ending. I would add that the ending for Dexter was good also.
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Martin will kill off an important character because he has no idea how to write a character arc out of a wet paper bag.
I actually don't think that's true. I think what you're reacting to comes with the epic scale of the novel (SoI&F really is just one, long, continuous work) -- both in word count and the enormous cast of characters. It's a kind of literary clutter. If you boiled Game of Thrones down to the story of Ned Stark's rise and downfall, that would be quite a satisfying (although grim) story arc. The fact that the story goes on and on after that dissipates the emotional impact of that one story line.
At over 1
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My predictions (Bear in mind that I have only read the first two books and watched the series up to the episode right before Viserys gets "crowned"):
1: Several more major characters will get killed of.
2: Many more ladies in the series will get thoroughly banged from behind.
3: Jon Snow will head up the Black watch and ally with Daenrys. In the end, they will hook up and rule the land together, and the two will bang happily ever after.
What would Hodor say?
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you forgot "mushroom mushroom" and "snake snake" FTFY. [weebls-stuff.com]
Re:Hodor (Score:5, Funny)
bool WillCharacterBeKilled(Character c)
{
if(IsCharacterPopular(c))
return true;
else
return true;
}
Re: Hodor (Score:2)
bool WillCharacterBeKilled(Character c)
{
return IsCharacterPopular(c) ? true : true;
}
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why not just:
bool WillCharacterBeKilled(Character c) { return IsCharacterPopular(c); }
and if this were C++, I would do:
bool WillCharacterBeKilled(const Character &c) { return IsCharacterPopular(c); }
as passing by reference (using the ampersand) prevents having to create an unnecessary copy of the object.
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Your algorithm has them killing off all the popular characters. You appear to have discovered the secret behind ABC's programming process.
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I actually upset a co-worker, who must not have been very far into the TV series when she was discussing the series with some others. I quiped that "They all die." She took it as a literal spoiler or something somehow. The Author has as much as said that anytime a character becomes a critically important character to keep alive for the story to progress, that he starts figuring out how to kill them and keep the story going.
Personally I'd like Jon, Arya, Bran and Tyrion to survive at least until the climax o
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Along with the idiots that discuss his 'work'.
He says as he discusses the aforementioned 'work'
Statistical Literature (Score:5, Funny)
Nevertheless, this statistical approach to literature could introduce the process of mathematical modelling to more people than any textbook.
Reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon language would probably easier.
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Nevertheless, this statistical approach to literature could introduce the process of mathematical modelling to more people than any textbook.
Reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon language would probably easier.
I don't have to read Shakespeare in Klingon, reading him in the original english is enough to put me to sleep.
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WOOSH!! Right over your head. :P
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I don't have to read Shakespeare in Klingon, reading him in the original english is enough to put me to sleep.
Some would say this doesn't deserved to be dignified with a response, but I disagree.
The best introduction to Shakespeares plays is to see them on stage, performed by actors who know how to perform Shakespeare. Because of the shift in language, there's special skill needed for presenting Shakespeare to modern audiences. You'll be amazed at how much you understand. Until you know the play's text you'll be missing a lot too, but in the performance you won't notice that.
I'd go so far as to say it's better to
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Oh, god. Mel Gibson's 1990 Hamlet was awful. It was the most asinine thing I've ever seen. Shakespeare for people who really *are* dummies. Reportedly it was director Franco Zeffirelli's attempt to make Shakespeare "less cerebral" and more accessible to the masses. What a choice to try that with! The whole point of Hamlet is that he's so damned smart the only person who can really stand in his way is him.
My point was that you've got to find an actor who can give a knowledgeable performance. Not some me
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I'm more interested to know which major character it believes may be dead? Every character is statistically likely to be dead at some point.
Unless of course you take the 'You cannot kill what never lived' point of view.
I think you meant "What is dead can never die". Not only is it a point of view, but it's actually a prayer of the Iron Islanders in GoT.
And yes, they can be killed, too. Just not all at once, it appears.
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> Another technique would be leaking a fake script, claiming to have read a draft manuscript, etc.
Of course, the interesting thing about this techinique is you can only tell it if it fails to work, because the case where it works, and the case where it fails but the desired result was going to happen anyway are indistinguishable unless the author actually pipes up and comments on it.
This reminds me of a friend of mine who used to flash his high beams erratically as he came up to red lights because he kne
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This reminds me of a friend of mine who used to flash his high beams erratically as he came up to red lights because he knew thats how the fire trucks signal to give them a green. I tried to tell him that there was no way this was going to work, but he was convinced it did because....of course.... fairly often he would flash his lights and the light would turn green for him....
I think your friend is influenced by this. [wikipedia.org]
I don't like it. (Score:2)
Until the writer reads that analysis and intentionally deviates from it.
In which case you've just shown them that mathematical modelling is unreliable.
When the real lesson should be not to use a tool for a job for which it was never intended.
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all the good books already follow formulas for story structure people figured out thousands of years ago. deviating from the formula is almost always a way to make a crappy book
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Go grab the last 20 titles in any genre. You'll see that most of them adhere to the tropes of that genre and are still crap.
A good author can write a good story even with the most formulaic plot.
A good author can write a good story even while subverting the established tropes of the genre.
But that's not important in this specific case. Martin can still change the specific tropes for individual characters in order to "twist" the ending fr
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The formulas say nothing about who dies halfway through the book. They're pretty much independent of the plot or plots.
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Nevertheless, this statistical approach to literature could introduce the process of mathematical modelling to more people than any textbook.
Until the writer reads that analysis and intentionally deviates from it.
Congratulations, you've just spoiled the plot of Minority Report (the original, not the movie).
just read Save the Cat (Score:2)
GRRM uses a 3 act structure with the beats to break up the acts for each of the character arcs across all the books. all you have to do is figure out where the character is in their story arc
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yes it can. good literature has flawed characters and the story line is overcoming their flaws
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In GRRM's work, the story line is either overcoming their flaws or dying horribly.
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Depends on when the author dies and the reins are given to Brandon Sanderson to finish it up once and for all.
Mental masturbation (Score:2)
This seems like pointless mental masturbation.
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Yeah, he kind of covers that in section 5. No reason for picking his model (other than simplicity), it can't predict new characters, and there's very little data to go off of.
Sure, it's mental masturbation. But developing little toy models like this is still interesting and helps you understand limitations and keep up your skills without working on big, complicated, boring real statistical models. This kind of thing is worth doing for the same reason masturbating is worth doing--it's fun. As long as you don
Books 4 and 5. (Score:2)
His analysis doesn't seem to take into account Martin originally wrote books 4 and 5 as one book, Seems to me those numbers should be averaged. Then again, IANAS.
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His analysis doesn't seem to take into account Martin originally wrote books 4 and 5 as one book, Seems to me those numbers should be averaged. Then again, IANAS.
Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, it started as one book that outgrew itself and was divided geographically but the timelines eventually merge again in Dance of Dragons with characters from the south appearing after the events of the fourth book. So it will be highly biased towards characters based in the north/east since they're in the entire book, followed by characters travelling north while those staying in the south aren't in the fifth book at all, but who will certainly return to finish
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Actually he did average them. The paper is at http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5830... [arxiv.org] and he discusses this issue in section 3.2.
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I was looking for that and can't believe I missed it. Thanks for pointing it out to me.
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He specifically notes this -- see sections 3.1 through 3.3 of the paper.
I think another approach that might be interesting to try would be to model the distance between adjacent POV chapters by a given character given the distribution of their previous POV chapters. For instance, if Arya's POV chapters are 10 chapters apart on average and book 6 will be 70 chapters, you'd probably expect 6 or 7 Arya POV chapters if they're uniformly distributed. On the other hand, Ned's last POV chapter was quite a while ag
If this makes fanboys STFU (Score:2)
great!
Interference (Score:2)
Since the makers of the series have access to this model (their PR department probably scans slashdot) and maybe they don't want to seem particularly predictable, a model of this type has extremely low odds of being accurate and popular simultaneously.
Re:Interference (Score:5, Funny)
(their PR department probably scans slashdot)
I suspect that you are overestimating Slashdot's relevance to the general public.
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Prediction... (Score:1)
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My prediction is that the last chapter will be two sentences long:
Snow falls. Everyone dies. [tvtropes.org]
Whether the first word is "snow" or "Snow" is left as an exercise to the reader.
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My Mathematical Model tells me . . . (Score:2)
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Let's save a lot of time. (Score:5, Insightful)
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> Daenerys Targaryen
Obviously... or we'd lose the whole story in the East and the threat of invasion that it brings. This would be less obvious if Daenerys had someone who could take her place, but I don't see that whole plot line just being cut with a quick death of the Mother of Dragons.
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Obviously... or we'd lose the whole story in the East and the threat of invasion that it brings. This would be less obvious if Daenerys had someone who could take her place, but I don't see that whole plot line just being cut with a quick death of the Mother of Dragons.
Actually there's at least two potential plot lines in the books already to make that... ambiguous. Heck, half the plot is taking seemingly irreplaceable characters and kill them, the world keeps on twisting and turning. But yes, I don't see it happening until after they've sailed for Westeros.
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two non-incestuous family leads
Are you sure of that? Most of the better theories put Jon Snow's father as Rhaegar and mother as Lyanna, making him her nephew. That's incest outside of west virginia.
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Jon Snow is perennially downtrodden (Score:2)
George RR Martin should read this paper (Score:2)
and adjust his narrative appropriately. Statistics and literature have different priorities.
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and adjust his narrative appropriately. Statistics and literature have different priorities.
I would have thought his imminent heart attack would figure more in his planning.
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I think he's been using it to generate the story. After all, even his dead characters have a frequent habit of returning to the storyline, having apparently forgotten they are dead.
If you've only ever seen the TV series, you wouldn't know that. Which is interesting to me, at least.
Statistics? (Score:3)
proof of hack writing (Score:2)
I like TFA, it is interesting and his methods are applicable to alot of different fields, for example: alot of music producers (particularly of pop music) have *very* sharply defined parameters for beats per minute (BPM) and timing of the 'hook' or chorus/refrain part of the song. I could see reversing this algorithm with a bank of keywords to plug in...basically hack writing that is automated
I do not think this is evidence that "machines can replace human writers"...
I think this is evidence that GoT is for
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well, i'm not going to disagree...
We will only know if this thing is accurate when the new book comes out.
right
and he could be reading this thread, right now, taking notes
or, he could be in Thailand getting a massage while a team of writers crank out copy that GRRM just signs-off on
my example is Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer...both are examples of absolute hack writing that benefitted from using marketing tactics to create a cult fanbase
Joss Whedon admitted they would just improvise plot/story/dialogue on the spot in later seasons...they litterally just made it up as they w
IDIOT (Score:1)
my mathematical model confirms this, here it is in pseodocode format
if timeOnHands > 0
you need something better to fill it with
What a waste of time and money (Score:1)
I have this system to win at craps (Score:1)
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"All that math is hooey."
misapplied, not 'hooey'.
"Past events don't affect future events for random acts like throwing dice or flipping a coin"
but they with people.
Another Stark dies (Score:4, Funny)
Every time someone tries to predict the end, another Stark dies.
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Ah the good ol' Martin Certainty Principle
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Asimov's First Foundation Problem (Score:2)
I take it this statistician has not read Asimov. By announcing the prediction, you void the prediction. He should have put his program in a certified sarcophagus and then revealed after the show that he had correctly predicted it. Otherwise George R. R. Martin will just use his results as a reason to adjust the script!
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no, the public prediction is merely a nudge to move the path of the story in the right direction, seeding the ground for the real prediction which remains hidden
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oh, how very Phil Dick. :)
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very Asimov too, as it turns out.
Not only is knowledge of the second foundation given to the first as a nudge, but later on the first is set up to eliminate a decoy second foundation as another nudge, while protecting the real second foundation.
This so-called statistician... (Score:4, Funny)
Now one statistician has taken this art to new heights by predicting the content of the soon-to-be published novels in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R R Martin.
soon-to-be published novels in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R R Martin.
soon-to-be published
soon
better re-check that model bro.
No mystery (Score:2)
Everyone is sitting at the table at a large feast and the scene switches to black.
My mathmatical prediction (Score:1)
Almost nothing really significant happens for tens of chapters, even though every chapter bleeds into the next with a cliffhanger making you want to read the next one. Plus there's several gratuitous sex scenes to keep the Slashdotters interested.
After many chapters of pretty much no development, something horrific happens toward the end mak
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You said math. Lets see it.
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Why use statistics? (Score:2)
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