This Fan Used A Quadratic Model To Predict When The New 'Game Of Thrones' Book Is Coming Out

After nearly seven years spent waiting for the follow-up to A Dance with Dragons, A Song of Ice and Fire fans have grown increasingly desperate for any news on when George R.R. Martin might release the next book in his bestselling fantasy series. Could math predict The Winds of Winter's release date, though? One Redditor believes it may be possible.

On Saturday, Reddit user King_of_Pyjamas posted data from their regression analysis to r/asoiaf. The model spans all seven planned books in the ASOIAF series — the five already published, plus The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring — and it churned out some pretty interesting numbers. King_of_Pyjamas says that their analysis "showed that the data thus far fits a quadratic model pretty well . . . with a standard error of 165 days!" The Redditor says that they know the sample size is far too small to generate any meaningful data, but they they thought they would have some fun with it anyway.

So what does this model have to say about The Winds of Winter's release date? According to King_of_Pyjamas' fancy math problem, ASOIAF fans can make plans to read the sixth book sometime around Nov. 21, 2018. Taking the standard error into account, this means that Martin's readers could reasonably expect to read The Winds of Winter sometime between June 9, 2018 and May 5, 2019. Which.... is pretty much what most fans already expected.

For George R.R. Martin's biggest fans, this is all cold comfort. The waits between books have grown lengthier as the series has progressed. A Dance with Dragons hit store shelves 2,094 days after A Feast for Crows, and the wait for The Winds of Winter hit the 2,094-day mark in April 2017. Despite Martin's hopes that the book would come out last year — and the year before that, and the year before that — fans still don't have a release date as the first quarter of 2018 draws to a close.

In spite of all the delays, however, The Winds of Winter has not gone off the rails to become whatever the books equivalent of vaporware is. A 2014 analysis predicted that, given the time and effort it takes to write a novel with hundreds of pages of interwoven storylines, The Winds of Winter could possibly come out in 2017. Even though we didn't get a new ASOIAF book last year — and might not get one this year, either — fans can hold out hope knowing that The Winds of Winter will be worth the wait.