By: Jonathan O’Callaghan/IFL Science Are you tired of waiting for George R. R. Martin to finish his latest installment of A Song of Ice And Fire, called The Winds of Winter? Well, maybe you don’t have to be.
A software engineer called Zack Thoutt has used artificial intelligence (AI) to try to write the book himself, reports Motherboard. Known as a recurrent neural network (RNN), it has trawled through the 5,376 pages of the first five books and has taken a stab at writing the sixth.
The results are interesting, if not grammatically perfect. Thoutt began each chapter supplying a prime word to the RNN, and then told it how many words to write. Then the network was left to its own devices. You can read the first five chapters on GitHub.
“Tyrion could hear Lord Aemon’s coughing,” the RNN begins. “’I miss for it. Why did you proper?’”
It goes on to take its own direction with the story, introducing a new character called Greenbeard. It predicts Jamie Lannister will *gasp* kill his sister Cersei, and that dragon queen Daenerys will be poisoned by her advisor Varys.
Of course, Martin’s actual storyline is likely to differ wildly. But it’s fun nonetheless to see AI learn his language and style, and then attempt to recreate it. Here’s another excerpt.
“Jaime yelled, in the dirt, and came to climb off beside his bedchamber, and we could almost find the tunnel at once, but we’d shut it without battle if she sings, then, and you may storm woods for fire to the west, where we feed the others. The rats come home to their lives!”
Thoutt noted that despite having quite a lot of pages, his RNN would actually work better with about 100 times more content and much simpler vocabulary. It’s also not too good at picking up on what happened in previous books, such as remembering characters that died.
“Martin is obviously very descriptive in his writing, so those extra adjectives and the fictional locations and titles are just more complications for the network,” Thoutt told Motherboard.
This isn’t the only recent AI Game of Thrones project. The website Inverse is asking people to submit their own theories for what will happen in the final season of the TV show after the finale a few days ago. Working with a firm called Unanimous AI, it will then make a hive-mind prediction of what will happen next.
People really just can’t get enough of Westeros, can they?
