If someone who had never watched "Game of Thrones"— or read the original written series "A Song of Ice and Fire"— asked who the main character was, what would you say?
Though many point to Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen as the main protagonists, narrowing it down to just one is tough.
Thanks to the beauty of statistical analysis and network science, we finally have an answer: Tyrion Lannister.
We first spotted the study on Quartz, where Adam Epstein spoke with researchers Andrew J. Beveridge and Jie Shan about their published study titled "Network of Thrones."
The research technique finds and analyzes patterns in text. "The pair started by connecting characters every time they 'interacted' in the third book of the series, 'A Storm of Swords,'"Epstein explains. "Whenever two characters appeared within 15 words of one another, a link (or 'edge') was added between them."
This helped narrow down the main characters by simply noting how often they appeared in the text and interacted with fellow characters.
Here's how their graph appears in the published study:
As you can see, Tyrion is the character who is most central to the surround storylines, and interacts with the highest number of fellow characters. "Acting as the Hand of the King, Tyrion is thrust into the center of the political machinations of the capitol city,"the study reports. "Our analysis suggests that he is the true protagonist of the book."
You can read the full write-up on Beveridge and Shan's research on Math Horizons. "Game of Thrones" returns to HBO on April 24. Tyrion and Daenerys remain alive and well, for now. Jon Snow is a whole other story, but our money is on him coming back to life and maintaining a status of top-three main characters.
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