After last night’s pearler finale of Game of Thrones, it’s gonna be a long bloody wait until the next season, which is set to air in 2019. With the story’s author George R.R. Martin still working on his latest book, fans don’t have a lot to tide themselves over during the long gap.
But there might be a little something to keep you going if you enjoy novels written by artificial intelligence.
Full-stack software engineer Zack Thoutt is training a recurrent neural network (RNN) to predict and write the events of the unfinished book, The Winds of Winter, and folks, things are getting weird.
Thoutt used knowledge gained through a Udacity course on artificial intelligence to start the project.
“I’m a huge fan of Game of Thrones, the books and the show,” he said. “I had worked with RNNs a bit in that class and thought I’d give working with the books a shot.”
A neural network is a machine learning algorithm that’s modelled after the human brain, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that smart. While it can piece together some nuggets of plausible plot points, it also trips up by occasionally writing about characters who have already died.
“If the model were that good authors might be in trouble,” said Thoutt. “The model is striving to be a new book and to take everything into account, but it makes a lot of mistakes because the technology to train a perfect text generator that can remember complex plots over millions of words doesn’t exist yet.”
Old mate fed the entire 5,376 pages of the first five books to the system, after which it spat out five predicted chapters of the next novel. You can read all of them here, but we’ve put together some of the best parts below.
“I feared Master Sansa, Ser,” Ser Jaime reminded her. “She Baratheon is one of the crossing. The second sons of your onion concubine.”
What in the fuck is an onion concubine? Also, I don’t remember Sansa being a Baratheon.
“Aye, Pate.” the tall man raised a sword and beckoned him back and pushed the big steel throne to where the girl came forward. Greenbeard was waiting toward the gates, big blind bearded pimple with his fallen body scraped his finger from a ring of white apple. It was half-buried mad on honey of a dried brain, of two rangers, a heavy frey.”
Who is this Greenbeard, you ask? He’s a totally made up character. Some of more notable theories told by the network include Jaime killing Cersei, Jon Snow riding a dragon and Varys poisoning Daenerys.
“Jaime killed Cersei and was cold and full of words, and Jon thought he was the wolf now, and white harbor…”
If you’re a big Game of Thrones nerd, you’ll know that all of these theories have been talked about by fans previously.
There you have it folks, computer generated fiction at its finest. Writers can rest easy knowing computers can’t steal their jobs… Yet.
