George R.R. Martin has been notoriously taking his sweet time to come up with "Winds of Winter," the next installment of his fantasy novels which inspired the HBO hit show "Game of Thrones." This has not stopped fans from wondering about the book's release date, and the wait has even caused them to create an artificial intelligence (AI) that can predict the story for them.
According to Motherboard, a recurrent neural network (RNN) was utilized by Zack Thoutt to predict the story of the sixth novel. "A Song of Ice and Fire" is a seven book series, which now only has five books out. In the HBO adaptation, the producers had to go on with their own version of the story starting somewhere in the middle of the sixth season. This angered a lot of the fans, especially since the last book was published in 2011.
The predictions that the AI had made was not too far-off from the original story either. According to Inquirer, the AI was able to predict Jon Snow to be riding a dragon, which after the big revelation of the HBO final episode in season 7, makes perfect sense. The AI came up with upwards of 5,000 pages that detail the next chapter in the books, and some of the noteworthy cliffhangers had also been reported to be accurate considering it was created by AI.
Martin's latest update about "Winds of Winter" was announced on July 22, 2017. He updated his fans that he is still writing the book, just to reassure them that he is indeed working on the highly-anticipated novel. However, he also stated that he is months away from finishing it, and did not provide an estimated time of completion. This is something that he has been doing for quite some time now.
Though there have been numerous events where Martin would read his next books to an audience at events or conventions, this is likely just a means to keep them happy about the delay. Inquisitr has even theorized that the original plan of releasing seven books could be reduced to six instead — making "Winds of Winter" the final chapter in the series of "A Song of Ice and Fire."
"Winds of Winter" is expected to finally arrive sometime in 2018. If the next novel will indeed be the last book of the series, then fans will have enough time to finish the book before the final season of the television adaptation, which is scheduled to air in 2019.
