When it comes to predicting who will die next on Game of Thrones, the best answer is always, “Yes.” You can only see so many Red Weddings, Viper/Mountain duels, “Hold the door”-s, and Sept of Baelor explosions before you just assume everyone in Westeros will end up dead eventually. But while we have a fatalistic outlook, we have to wonder sincerely: what are the actual survival odds for the most important denizens of the Realm going into the show’s last season? We finally have an idea, thanks to an algorithm that studied thousands of George R.R. Martin’s characters. Most have a better shot at survival than we’d guess… though things still don’t look great.
Taylor Larkin of DataRobot undertook this predictive analysis, (via EW), writing that Martin’s proclivity for “creating shocking plot twists involving the intricacies of the political climate in Westeros” lends to game theory serving as a better tool for figuring out what will happen next than actually studying the texts. So he created an algorithm to do it. His results are based on investigating “what house and culture a character belong to, their title, gender, nobility status, age, and if any of their relatives had died” for over 2,000 characters from a fan-made wiki for A Song of Ice and Fire.
You can see the exact formula he used at DataRobot, which showed that female characters don’t die as often as male characters, as the latter are more frequently sent off to battle, and that “northemen” are safer than their “valyrian” counterparts. But we we really care about is which among the characters who have a chance to sit on the Iron Throne has the highest chance of death. We have some bad news for you dragon lovers.
- Daenerys Targaryen: 83.77%
- Jaime Lannister: 72.91%
- Tyrion Lannister: 70.76%
- Bran Stark: 66.02%
- Cersei Lannister: 60.39%
- Jon Snow: 58.99%
- Euron Greyjoy: 54.95%
- Sansa Stark: 50.28%
- Arya Stark: 49.04%
- Gendry: 39.87%
Not great for the Mother of Dragons, but look at our boy Gendry! Maybe our theory about him isn’t so crazy! As long as you ignore the non-algorithm predictive analysis that all of them are going to die.
Who do you think has the worst odds of survival? It won’t kill you to tell us in the comments below.
Images: HBO
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