The sixth season of HBO's Game of Thrones is just a little out of reach and, while fans are agonizing over who is really going to stay alive in the series and ultimately take the Iron Throne, Mathematicians from the Macalester College turned to Network Science to figure out who will statistically prevail and published the result of their efforts in Mathematical Association of America's Math Horizons journal.
The recent trailer for the sixth season already is not looking good for our favorite characters since the High Sparrow openly declared that everyone pretty much deserves death but Associate Professor Andrew J. Beveridge and his undergraduate student Jie Shan just statistically proved that fans may be on to something with a certain character.
After a series of mapping and charting character mentions, interactions and individual appearances in George R.R. Martin's "A Storm of Swords," the two mathematicians came up with a social network-like map for each of the "main" characters and, yes, the thicker the line between two characters, the more weight their relationship have. Take a look at the map below.
Next, they weighed the importance of characters using six centrality measures: Degree Centrality, Weighted Degree, Eigenvector, PageRank, Closeness and Betweenness. Basically, Degree Centrality is the number of connections a character has while Weighted Degree shows the number of interactions. These two measures can be determined by looking at the thickness of each line connecting characters with each other.
Eigenvector is what they call a feedback loop and basically increases a character's value by the number of high ranking or central characters he is connected with. Compare Sansa Stark who has been passed on from one powerful House to another as opposed to Daenerys who has been conquering lands but who has not really met the most powerful members of the ruling families-Sansa wins this round.
PageRank is borrowed from Google and it raises the value of a character based on the value of important characters he or she is associated with. To illustrate, Daenerys does not have many valuable connections but the fact that she is connected to Tyrion who holds the top gives her a really good boost.
Closeness is somewhat self-explanatory but, in this case, a lower value means a character is more important. Betweenness, on the other hand, deals with the frequency the character shows up between two communicating characters, which gives them the opportunity to be a broker of information. Perhaps Varys or Petyr Baelish would rank high if they were included in the study.
Now here is the interesting part: after all the mapping and computing, the study showed that the three characters who consistently stood out are Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow and Sansa Stark but we all know that one of the three is already definitely dead.
The showrunners also mentioned that season six is the season where the female characters would take center stage so, if the result of the study is accurate, there may just be a face-off between former married couple Tyrion and Sansa. Remember that the study was conducted using only the third book in the series but it would be interesting to find out how things will play out from hereon.
Game of Thrones returns to HBO April 24.
