As the world patiently waits for the eighth and final season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” a group of scientists and mathematicians has crunched some numbers and given their best guess as to who will meet a grim end before the story is over.
A data scientist named Taylor Larkin, working with a group called Data Robot, used information culled from the fan-created wiki about the show to develop a complex algorithm to determine the most likely characters to die before someone ultimately sits upon the Iron Throne.
While the fates of the characters and the plot are ultimately in the hands of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Larkin’s use of data and math offers perhaps the most educated guess as to what may happen next in a show that's not shy about killing off main characters. To get his results, he used several common sense factors such as a character’s age, gender, house affiliation, geographic location in the world of Westeros and much more.
The study found that a character’s house allegiance, age and whether or not they had dead relatives played the biggest part in their overall chances. Larkin notes that the house affiliation makes the most sense as certain enemies of the realm tend to drop bodies more than others.
Additionally, if your a member of any of the show’s northern cultures (southern if you hail from beyond the wall), you’re at less of a risk to die. However, if you’re a man or the Mother of Dragons, you’re at a significantly higher risk than most females.
Here’s the breakdown of characters most likely to go:
Daenerys Targaryen: 83.77 percent chance to die.
Jaime Lannister: 73.91 percent chance to die.
Tyrion Lannister: 70.76 percent chance to die.
Bran Stark: 70.76 percent chance to die.
Cersei Lannister: 60.39 percent chance to die.
Jon Snow: 58.99 percent chance to die.
Euron Greyjoy: 54.95 percent chance to die.
Sansa Stark: 50.28 percent chance to die.
Arya Stark: 49.04 percent chance to die.
Gendry: 39.87 percent chance to die.
It’s again worth noting that the above numbers can hardly be considered a spoiler as the show’s future will likely not be determined by raw numbers. Both the showrunners as well as George R.R. Martin, who wrote the novel series that show is based on, tend to weave through characters and deaths as though they’re traffic cones leading to the eventual end.
As for what that ending is, fans will just have to wait until Season 8 begins sometime in 2019. Will science prove a worthy predictor of the future?