Book fans of Game of Thrones (or, technically, A Song of Ice and Fire) have long enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude at the expense of TV-only viewers. While the wait for the final season might feel endless, it's nothing compared to the six years (and counting) since the release of A Dance with Dragons. George R.R. Martin has suggested that The Winds of Winter could take all of 2018 to finish.
The Long Wait for The Winds of Winter
A Game of Thrones was published in 1996. Two years later came A Clash of Kings. A Storm of Swords arrived in 2000. A Feast of Crows took five years, and A Dance with Dragons took six more. The Winds of Winter is now missing in action, and any question about A Dream of Spring simply disappears into the void. If Martin's own words are anything to go by, the next novel might be done before the end of the year, in 2018, or early 2019. The most devoted fans can wait, but television cannot. The recent seasons of the live-action adaptation have little to do with the current source material, yet in the name of time, audience, and creativity, the decision to separate the two developments has become necessary.
A Neural Network Tries Its Hand
Meanwhile, Martin's delay has sparked some fascinating projects, like the one from engineer Zack Thoutt. After completing a course in artificial intelligence and deep learning, he decided to train a recurrent neural network with the goal of predicting the events of the next novel. One key is to prepare the network so it doesn't repeat details that have already happened, but it also can't ignore them entirely. One of its most common mistakes was writing about characters who had already died.
So far, the neural network has written a total of five chapters, all published on GitHub (link below). The first five books accumulate a total of 5,376 pages, and while that's an impressive number for us, it represents a significant limit in neural training. Now, I'm convinced George won't be out of a job, but the network has presented some interesting ideas, such as Sansa Stark actually being a Baratheon, and Varys poisoning Daenerys, among other things.
