To say that the sixth installment of George R.R. Martin's popular book series, "A Song of Ice and Fire," has been a long time coming is quite an understatement. It has been six years since the esteemed author published the fifth book, "A Dance With Dragons." With no official release date for the sixth sequel, "The Winds of Winter," fans of the fantasy novels are more than frustrated.
To be fair, George R. R. Martin never indicated that the novel would be out anytime soon, but he reminded fans to be patient. Meanwhile, season 7 of the TV adaptation of the book series, "Game of Thrones," is over as well. This has left fans to pine for George R. R. Martin's slow writing.
Eventually, this led some fans to do extreme digging. Recently, a software engineer named Zack Thoutt turned to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) known as a recurrent neural network and had it concoct the books' sixth installment. To do it, Thoutt fed the network all the pages of Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, leading the network to derive its own predictions on what will happen to the 'Winds of Winter."
The whole thing is not perfect, but it led to some fan theories being realized, such as the poisoning of Danaerys by Varys, Jon eventually riding a dragon, and so on. However, more often than not, the algorithm produced some nonsensical observations, and according to Thoutt during his interview with Motherboard, "It's obviously not perfect."
"It isn't building a long-term story and the grammar isn't perfect. But the network is able to learn the basics of the English language and structure of George R.R. Martin's style on its own," added Thoutt.
Still, it is not the same unless George R.R. Martin himself wrote the sequel. Although he has set no release date yet, he did tell his fans that there would be another book out coming next year. Whether it is the "Winds of Winter" or the announced Targaryen family history spinoff, no one knows for sure.
