1068: Swiftkey

This is comic number 1068. It was posted on June 13, 2012.

Image text: Although the Markov chain-style text model is still rudimentary; it recently gave me "Massachusetts Institute of America". Although I have to admit it sounds prestigious.

Swiftkey is a product that is installable only on Android-based phones and tablets. Swiftkey has noticed their inclusion in XKCD and have created a blog post for other users to comment with their default phrase when they hit the "central prediction key". The results are pretty funny. [1]

In the image text, the Markov chain is a reference to: (via wikipedia) "A Markov chain, named after Andrey Markov, is a mathematical system that undergoes transitions from one state to another, between a finite or countable number of possible states. It is a random process characterized as memoryless: the next state depends only on the current state and not on the sequence of events that preceded it. This specific kind of "memorylessness" is called the Markov property. Markov chains have many applications as statistical models of real-world processes."

So, that makes sense because Swiftkey only looks at the previous word, not the sequence of words that preceded that word.

And of course the "I am so sorry - that's never happened before" is a sexual reference as that is something a guy would say after a particularly unsatisfying sexual encounter. And of course that is funny because it is his typical sentence, so he is texting that phrase over and over again.