Winter has come. Eight years almost to the day after HBO debuted its epic adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, Game of Thrones returns for its 8th and final season. Even at an estimated budget of $90M for six of what are being described more as movies than as television episodes, the show’s greatest responsibility is to its ardent fans, who are looking to the final season for answers to the biggest – and smallest – questions lingering in the Seven Kingdoms.
Chief among those concerns is, naturally, who will sit on the Iron Throne at the end of this epic saga. But there are dozens of threads left for showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff to tie up, and just as many fan theories about what could happen over the six final episodes. To find out the answers to these questions big and small, researchers at Unanimous AI convened a group of Game of Thrones fanatics to forecast the last season of one of the most popular television shows of all time.
To produce this comprehensive forecast, the group of fans would convene in the Swarm platform and combine their wisdom, intelligence, and intuition as a real-time system capable of answering nearly any question about Season 8. The replay below shows how the Swarm interface empowers the group to converge on their AI-optimized output in seconds.
Using an iterative methodology that compels participants to compare potential responses a maximum number of times, the Game of Thrones fans were able to produce a Scaled Ranking of the most likely winners of the all-important Iron Throne. The chart below makes clear just how much more likely the King of the North is to survive the season than any of his rivals.
Whatever comfort that might bring Jon Snow should be tempered, of course, by the Swarm AI system’s near-equal confidence that his sisters Arya and Sansa Stark will not be quite so fortunate. Regardless of what happens to the Stark sisters, there are likely to be thousands of deaths in the wars to come, and if the AI is correct, Cersei Lannister will be among them as “the most murderous woman in the world” finally receives her comeuppance.
Over the past eight years, a number of sometimes-wild fan theories have surfaced that cover the entire spectrum of plausibility from the absurd to seemingly inevitable. While a comprehensive ranking of these theories is beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced AI/Human hybrid intelligence systems, Unanimous AI has created a ranking of a few of these theories from most to least likely to occur in Season 8.
Finally, the group of Game of Thrones fans was asked to forecast a number of highly-anticipated events like the CleganeBowl ( a mythic clash between oversized brothers Sandor and Gregor Clegane ) and the potential arrival of a child for the Mother of Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen. The full suite of predictions is available in the replays below.
Fans of the show should take heart in the AI’s forecast for absolutely massive numbers in the show’s final season, as it makes the subsequent prediction that these last six episodes will not be our last adventure in the Seven Kingdoms all that much more likely to come true, as well.
About Unanimous AI
Unanimous AI is the maker of Swarm®, the world’s first SaaS platform for amplifying the intelligence of business teams. The Swarm platform and Swarm AI technology from Unanimous was recognized as SXSW’s 2018 “Artificial Intelligence Innovation of the Year” and was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation ( #nsffunded #nsfstories ) to further its groundbreaking research. hashtags.
Want to learn more about our Swarm AI technology? Check out our TED talk below…
