Richard Vale at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has taken to his computer to come up with a statistical model to work out the plot of the future Game of Throne’s books. George R R Martin is famously slow at writing his books and seems to be spending more time talking to the press about writing them than actually getting any stories to the publisher.

The approach that Vale has taken is to use the distribution of characters in chapters in the first five books to predict the distribution in the forthcoming novels. He created a single table of data which summarises the number of chapters that each character has starred in so far. For example, the character Jon Snow starred in nine chapters in the first book, eight in the second, 12 in the third, none in the fourth and 13 in the fifth. Brienne starred in eight chapters in the fourth book but in none of the others.

Vale wanted to see if what can be predicted about future books based only on this data from the existing ones. The approach is entirely statistical so it does not include common sense assumptions such as the idea that a character killed off in the past is unlikely to star in the future.

Then he runs the whole lot through a computer program to find the parameters in the model that best fit the data. And having found the best fits, he then uses the model to find the probability distributions of the number of chapters that each character will star in in book 6 and book 7.

He found that some characters are unlikely to star in any chapters and if one particular character is likely to be dead or not, following an ambiguous chapter in the fifth novel. The model does not deal with the possibility of new characters being introduced. 

It is the first scientific paper which we have seen which comes with a spoiler warning.