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Cambodia shut its borders when COVID-19 struck, giving rise to new wave of trafficking, with stranded foreign workers and tourists lured into working for fraudulent investment schemes

* Foreigners lured by adverts offering call centre jobs

* Held against their will, victims forced into online scams

* Pandemic makes it easier for gangs to exploit foreigners

* China links kidnapping, trafficking to online gambling

By Matt Blomberg

PHNOM PENH, Sept 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Foreign workers and tourists stranded in Cambodia during the COVID-19 pandemic have been trafficked and forced to work in sophisticated Chinese-run online scams, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation has found.

In interviews, nine trafficking victims said they were lured by social media adverts promising well-paid jobs in call centres.

Instead, they ended up in shuttered hotel casinos and guarded compounds where they had their passports confiscated before being put to work online.

The victims, mainly from Africa and Asia, said they were ordered to create fake profiles on Tinder, WhatsApp and Facebook to entice people into fraudulent investment schemes involving cryptocurrencies, foreign exchange and shares.

Those who objected or performed poorly were subjected to violence and threats, victims said. Mary, a teacher from the Philippines, said she miscarried while locked in a room without food and water for three days.

"We were desperate," said Mary, who was three months pregnant and four months out of work when she responded in July to a Facebook post offering call centre jobs to English-speaking foreigners.

"We thought it was real work but it became a living nightmare," said the 26-year-old, whose name has been changed to protect her identity.

Approached for comment on the nine trafficking cases that the Thomson Reuters Foundation uncovered, a spokesperson for the Cambodian interior ministry said, "We also have heard about this before but until now we still do not have any evidence."

Cambodian police have previously carried out raids and deported hundreds of Chinese on suspicion of telecoms scams. But organised crime experts said the police have struggled to stamp out online crime because of corruption and weak law enforcement.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company would investigate profiles and groups passed on by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A spokesperson for WhatsApp said that users should use tools in the app to report suspicious activity.

A Tinder spokesperson said it had "zero-tolerance" for "romance scams" and that it would "work with law enforcement to ensure justice is served in such cases".
'CHINESE MAFIA'
Cambodia shut its borders when COVID-19 struck in March 2020, barred almost all international flights and closed its schools to contain the virus, leaving many tourists and foreign workers unemployed and unable to return home.

For more than a decade, Chinese criminal groups have used Cambodia as a base for online scams that duped Chinese nationals out of billions of dollars. Crime experts said the pandemic has made it easier for these groups to target stranded foreigners.

Four of the nine captives interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation were unemployed teachers - three from Asia and one from Uganda. Another was a construction worker from Bangladesh, three were tourists, and one was a Tanzanian graphic designer.

Two days after agreeing to work at a call centre near the Phnom Penh airport, Mary, the teacher from the Philippines, was in her recruiter's car, bound for on-site training - or so she thought.

When the car passed the airport, the driver said the induction had been moved to Sihanoukville, a port city some 200-km (125 miles) away that has received an influx of money from China, Cambodia's largest foreign investor.

More than 80 casinos have been built in the city, largely for foreign tourists and online punters as it is illegal for Cambodians to gamble.

Back in 2018, the province's governor at the time, Yun Min, had warned that the influx of Chinese investment in the region was leading to a surge in crimes by "Chinese mafia", including kidnapping.

China's embassy in Phnom Penh declined to comment on the Thomson Reuters Foundation's findings but called on Cambodia to enforce its online gambling ban, which it introduced in 2019, saying the industry had become a security concern amid rising reports of crime.

"Kidnapping and human trafficking are by-products of illegal online gambling," a spokesperson said in emailed comments.

"Instead of addressing only the symptoms by focusing on individual cases, full implementation of online gambling prohibition can stem the problem from its root."
LOCKED IN A ROOM
Inside a heavily guarded compound in Sihanoukville, Mary said she handed her passport to human resources and was given the tools for her new job: five iPhones and five British SIM cards.

Mary said she was told to use images of attractive women to create fake identities on Tinder, WhatsApp and Facebook and find people interested in foreign exchange trading.

A few hours in, she told the manager she wanted out.

"She started threatening me: 'We will beat you if you don't follow our rules,'" Mary recalled. "I told her, 'I signed no contract. I want to leave. Release me.'"

Mary said the manager replied, "If you won't work, pack your bags - we sell you to another company."

Mary was locked in a room, bare except for three bed frames and two other women, also bound for a new boss, she said.

For two nights and three days, they went unfed, drinking water from a toilet in a bathroom which they were allowed to access at the whim of their guards, she said.

Guards had confiscated their phones - but Mary had a second device and was relaying events to her husband who, after reporting the situation to police in Sihanoukville, took up vigil at the compound's gates.

"I was worried if they transfer my wife, I would not find her again," he said.
'SINISTER'
Sihanoukville is a haven for a new breed of "sinister" Chinese gangs that take advantage of Cambodia's fast internet speeds and relaxed visa rules, said John Coyne, head of the Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre, a research group.

"Sihanoukville is a criminal hotspot created by the confluence of Chinese money, Chinese organised crime groups and a very poor legal environment," said Coyne, an ex-police officer and expert on organised crime in the Mekong region.

Beijing has sent police and planes to Cambodia to take home hundreds of suspected Chinese scammers in recent years, sending a "very heavy and very public ... message to its citizens" about the risks of engaging in crime, said a foreign law enforcement official monitoring the situation.

"The operators shifted to other targets," said the official, adding that by trafficking more people who speak languages other than Chinese, the gangs were able to target more nationalities.

"Eight new clients per day. If you don't get eight, you keep working," said a Tanzanian woman who took what was advertised online as a call centre job in Sihanoukville in June.

"Four hundred of us in one room - cheat, cheat, cheat. That's the job," she said, describing how she used fake online profiles to trap people into fraudulent investment schemes.

When the woman told management she wanted to leave, she was locked in a room with Mary and given two options: pay $2,000 or be sold to another company, she said.

The woman shared contact numbers for her trafficker, who told the Thomson Reuters Foundation he was paid a $1,000 commission for each person recruited to work in Sihanoukville but denied recruiting a Tanzanian woman.

The recruiter, who said he was Chinese and gave his name as Li Qiang, said he worked for a large firm that did not have a name, and said that his actions did not involve trafficking.

"The employee can leave whenever they want," he said.

The police chief in Preah Sihanouk province, where Sihanoukville is located, and a spokesman for the provincial administration, declined to comment.
SOLD LIKE GOATS
Cambodia has become a popular destination for workers in tourism, construction and education, which have been hard-hit by COVID-19, leaving a pool of "invisible people" for recruiters to prey on, said labour abuse investigator Khun Tharo.

"Many have lost their jobs and they're very easy to access, very easy to scam," said Tharo of labour non-profit CENTRAL.

Nehan, a teacher from Nepal who has lived in Cambodia for five years and was laid off during the pandemic, said he responded to a Facebook advert for a call centre job after exhausting his savings - and ended up being enslaved.

"To them, we are just animals; bought and sold like goats and chickens," he said.

Nehan said he was taken to start work in the shuttered White Sand Palace Hotel in Sihanoukville.

"(People) think that during corona time, White Sand is closed, but what happens inside, they don't know," said Nehan, who was released after working for a month without pay when he threatened to get his wife to report the scammers to the police.

"People go in (to the hotel) ... then they cannot go out."

A woman who answered a phone at White Sand Palace Hotel said it was not possible to speak to management as they had gone "to China", adding that the hotel was not aware of any online scamming operations on the premises.

Nehan said he was taken to hotel rooms where hundreds of people - mostly Chinese - worked to coax online investors into fake investment schemes and into scanning a QR code embedded in a website that allows them to hack into people's smartphones.

"They are hackers, thieves," Nehan said.
BEATEN
All of the victims were told to pay a ransom to be freed, but only one did - a South African tourist, whose mother shared a screenshot of a July payment of $2,047 sent to a Cambodian who negotiated her son's release.

Six others said they used threats, negotiation and social media posts to win their release. Two are still being held.

The tourist shared photographs of himself in a hospital bed with a bruised face and a bandage around his head, which he said was stitched after he was beaten by his trafficker for trying to rally a walkout from a Chinese-run scamming operation.

"We tried not to do the money thing but in the end we had to. These people beat him up, and it's just been hell for one month that we've been trying to negotiate," his mother said shortly after his release.

In Mary's case, her husband shared her ordeal on Facebook after three days, when she told him she thought she had miscarried their baby.

He also gave details to local news website Cambodia News English, he said.

"At first (the traffickers) were angry - how was this information getting out? I had videos and photos from inside," Mary's husband said.

After threatening violence and demanding a $1,500 ransom, a deal was reached: Mary would be freed if he deleted the Facebook posts, he said.

The couple agreed and are now in hiding, unable to leave Cambodia together due to COVID-19 travel restrictions in their home and neighbouring countries.

"Right now, we feel only anger and fear," Mary's husband said. "I can't sleep. When I close my eyes, I can only imagine our child. When my wife sleeps, she shakes."
Related stories: Cambodia adds human trafficking lessons to schools Closed borders give rise to new wave of trafficking in Cambodia 'Will I ever see home again?': Cambodian teen bride trafficked to China tells of escape
(Reporting by Matt Blomberg, Additional Reporting by Vinh Socheata, Editing by Katy Migiro and Helen Popper. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Chinese scammers enslave jobless teachers and tourists in Cambodia

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Foreigners lured by adverts offering call centre jobs * Held against their will, victims forced into online scams * Pandemic makes it easier for gangs to exploit foreigners * China links kidnapping, trafficking to online gambling By Matt Blomberg PHNOM PENH, Sept 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Foreign workers and tourists stranded in Cambodia during the COVID-19 pandemic have been trafficked and forced to work in sophisticated Chinese-run online scams, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation has found.

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Cambodia job scam accusation brings backlash for 58.com in China

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Chinese online classifieds platform 58.com has come under heavy criticism in China after a Chinese national said he was tricked by one of its job advertisements to become the victim of a human trafficking ring in Cambodia.

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Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia's online scam gangs

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PHNOM PENH -- The first punch lands on the left side of the young man's face, the second on the right.Several more follow. Knees strike his stomach. H

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A chimpanzee seated at a typewriter

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events which has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly eventually occur, given unlimited time.

In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term meaning the event happens with probability 1, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. Variants of the theorem include multiple and even infinitely many typists, and the target text varies between an entire library and a single sentence.

One of the earliest instances of the use of the "monkey metaphor" is that of French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913, but the first instance may have been even earlier. Jorge Luis Borges traced the history of this idea from Aristotle's On Generation and Corruption and Cicero's De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, up to modern statements with their iconic simians and typewriters. In the early 20th century, Borel and Arthur Eddington used the theorem to illustrate the timescales implicit in the foundations of statistical mechanics.

Direct proof

There is a straightforward proof of this theorem. As an introduction, recall that if two events are statistically independent, then the probability of both happening equals the product of the probabilities of each one happening independently. For example, if the chance of rain in Moscow on a particular day in the future is 0.4 and the chance of an earthquake in San Francisco on any particular day is 0.00003, then the chance of both happening on the same day is 0.4 × 0.00003 = 0.000012, assuming that they are indeed independent.

Consider the probability of typing the word banana on a typewriter with 50 keys. Suppose that the keys are pressed randomly and independently, meaning that each key has an equal chance of being pressed regardless of what keys had been pressed previously. The chance that the first letter typed is 'b' is 1/50, and the chance that the second letter typed is 'a' is also 1/50, and so on. Therefore, the probability of the first six letters spelling banana is

(1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) = (1/50) ⁶ = 1/15,625,000,000.

Less than one in 15 billion, but not zero.

From the above, the chance of not typing banana in a given block of 6 letters is 1 − (1/50) ⁶. Because each block is typed independently, the chance X n of not typing banana in any of the first n blocks of 6 letters is

As n grows, X n gets smaller. For n = 1 million, X n is roughly 0.9999, but for n = 10 billion X n is roughly 0.53 and for n = 100 billion it is roughly 0.0017. As n approaches infinity, the probability X n approaches zero; that is, by making n large enough, X n can be made as small as is desired, and the chance of typing banana approaches 100%. Thus, the probability of the word banana appearing at some point in an infinite sequence of keystrokes is equal to one.

The same argument applies if we replace one monkey typing n consecutive blocks of text with n monkeys each typing one block (simultaneously and independently). In this case, X n = (1 − (1/50) ⁶)n is the probability that none of the first n monkeys types banana correctly on their first try. Therefore, at least one of infinitely many monkeys will ( with probability equal to one) produce a text as quickly as it would be produced by a perfectly accurate human typist copying it from the original.

Infinite strings

This can be stated more generally and compactly in terms of strings, which are sequences of characters chosen from some finite alphabet:

Given an infinite string where each character is chosen uniformly at random, any given finite string almost surely occurs as a substring at some position.

Given an infinite sequence of infinite strings, where each character of each string is chosen uniformly at random, any given finite string almost surely occurs as a prefix of one of these strings.

Both follow easily from the second Borel-Cantelli lemma. For the second theorem, let E k be the event that the kth string begins with the given text. Because this has some fixed nonzero probability p of occurring, the E k are independent, and the below sum diverges,

the probability that infinitely many of the E k occur is 1. The first theorem is shown similarly; one can divide the random string into nonoverlapping blocks matching the size of the desired text, and make E k the event where the k th block equals the desired string.

Probabilities

However, for physically meaningful numbers of monkeys typing for physically meaningful lengths of time the results are reversed. If there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the observable universe typing extremely fast for trillions of times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 26 ²⁰ = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 × 10 ²⁸). In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small as to be inconceivable. The text of Hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters. Thus there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10 183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10 183,946, or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10 360,783.

Even if every proton in the observable universe (which is estimated at roughly 10 ⁸⁰) were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a far greater amount of time - more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer - to have even a 1 in 10 ⁵⁰⁰ chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10 360,641 observable universes made of protonic monkeys. As Kittel and Kroemer put it in their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event ...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."

In fact there is less than a one in a trillion chance of success that such a universe made of monkeys could type any particular document a mere 79 characters long.

Almost surely

The probability that an infinite randomly generated string of text will contain a particular finite substring is 1. However, this does not mean the substring's absence is "impossible", despite the absence having a prior probability of 0. For example, the immortal monkey could randomly type G as its first letter, G as its second, and G as every single letter thereafter, producing an infinite string of Gs; at no point must the monkey be "compelled" to type anything else. (To assume otherwise implies the gambler's fallacy.) However long a randomly generated finite string is, there is a small but nonzero chance that it will turn out to consist of the same character repeated throughout; this chance approaches zero as the string's length approaches infinity. There is nothing special about such a monotonous sequence except that it is easy to describe; the same fact applies to any nameable specific sequence, such as "RGRGRG" repeated forever, or "a-b-aa-bb-aaa-bbb-...", or "Three, Six, Nine, Twelve...".

If the hypothetical monkey has a typewriter with 90 equally likely keys that include numerals and punctuation, then the first typed keys might be "3.14" (the first three digits of pi) with a probability of (1/90) ⁴, which is 1/65,610,000. Equally probable is any other string of four characters allowed by the typewriter, such as "GGGG", "mATh", or "q%8e". The probability that 100 randomly typed keys will consist of the first 99 digits of pi (including the separator key), or any other particular sequence of that length, is much lower: (1/90) ¹⁰⁰. If the monkey's allotted length of text is infinite, the chance of typing only the digits of pi is 0, which is just as possible (mathematically probable) as typing nothing but Gs (also probability 0).

The same applies to the event of typing a particular version of Hamlet followed by endless copies of itself; or Hamlet immediately followed by all the digits of pi; these specific strings are equally infinite in length, they are not prohibited by the terms of the thought problem, and they each have a prior probability of 0. In fact, any particular infinite sequence the immortal monkey types will have had a prior probability of 0, even though the monkey must type something.

This is an extension of the principle that a finite string of random text has a lower and lower probability of being a particular string the longer it is (though all specific strings are equally unlikely). This probability approaches 0 as the string approaches infinity. Thus, the probability of the monkey typing an endlessly long string, such as all of the digits of pi in order, on a 90-key keyboard is (1/90) ∞ which equals (1/∞) which is essentially 0. At the same time, the probability that the sequence contains a particular subsequence (such as the word MONKEY, or the 12th through 999th digits of pi, or a version of the King James Bible) increases as the total string increases. This probability approaches 1 as the total string approaches infinity, and thus the original theorem is correct.

Correspondence between strings and numbers

In a simplification of the thought experiment, the monkey could have a typewriter with just two keys: 1 and 0. The infinitely long string thusly produced would correspond to the binary digits of a particular real number between 0 and 1. A countably infinite set of possible strings end in infinite repetitions, which means the corresponding real number is rational. Examples include the strings corresponding to one-third (010101...), five-sixths (11010101...) and five-eighths (1010000...). Only a subset of such real number strings (albeit a countably infinite subset) contains the entirety of Hamlet (assuming that the text is subjected to a numerical encoding, such as ASCII).

Meanwhile, there is an uncountably infinite set of strings which do not end in such repetition; these correspond to the irrational numbers. These can be sorted into two uncountably infinite subsets: those which contain Hamlet and those which do not. However, the "largest" subset of all the real numbers are those which not only contain Hamlet, but which contain every other possible string of any length, and with equal distribution of such strings. These irrational numbers are called normal. Because almost all numbers are normal, almost all possible strings contain all possible finite substrings. Hence, the probability of the monkey typing a normal number is 1. The same principles apply regardless of the number of keys from which the monkey can choose; a 90-key keyboard can be seen as a generator of numbers written in base 90.

Statistical mechanics

In one of the forms in which probabilists now know this theorem, with its "dactylographic" [i.e., typewriting] monkeys ( French: singes dactylographes; the French word singe covers both the monkeys and the apes), appeared in Émile Borel's 1913 article " Mécanique Statique et Irréversibilité" ( Static mechanics and irreversibility), and in his book "Le Hasard" in 1914. His "monkeys" are not actual monkeys; rather, they are a metaphor for an imaginary way to produce a large, random sequence of letters. Borel said that if a million monkeys typed ten hours a day, it was extremely unlikely that their output would exactly equal all the books of the richest libraries of the world; and yet, in comparison, it was even more unlikely that the laws of statistical mechanics would ever be violated, even briefly.

The physicist Arthur Eddington drew on Borel's image further in The Nature of the Physical World (1928), writing:

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

These images invite the reader to consider the incredible improbability of a large but finite number of monkeys working for a large but finite amount of time producing a significant work, and compare this with the even greater improbability of certain physical events. Any physical process that is even less likely than such monkeys' success is effectively impossible, and it may safely be said that such a process will never happen. It is clear from the context that Eddington is not suggesting that the probability of this happening is worthy of serious consideration. On the contrary, it was a rhetorical illustration of the fact that below certain levels of probability, the term improbable is functionally equivalent to impossible.

Origins and "The Total Library"

In a 1939 essay entitled "The Total Library", Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges traced the infinite-monkey concept back to Aristotle's Metaphysics. Explaining the views of Leucippus, who held that the world arose through the random combination of atoms, Aristotle notes that the atoms themselves are homogeneous and their possible arrangements only differ in shape, position and ordering. In On Generation and Corruption, the Greek philosopher compares this to the way that a tragedy and a comedy consist of the same "atoms", i.e., alphabetic characters. Three centuries later, Cicero's De natura deorum ( On the Nature of the Gods) argued against the Epicurean atomist worldview:

Is it possible for any man to behold these things, and yet imagine that certain solid and individual bodies move by their natural force and gravitation, and that a world so beautifully adorned was made by their fortuitous concourse? He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.

Borges follows the history of this argument through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, then observes that in his own time, the vocabulary had changed. By 1939, the idiom was "that a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum." (To which Borges adds, "Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice.") Borges then imagines the contents of the Total Library which this enterprise would produce if carried to its fullest extreme:

Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves - shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies - ever reward them with a tolerable page.

Borges' total library concept was the main theme of his widely read 1941 short story " The Library of Babel", which describes an unimaginably vast library consisting of interlocking hexagonal chambers, together containing every possible volume that could be composed from the letters of the alphabet and some punctuation characters.

Actual monkeys

In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter "S", the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine. Mike Phillips, director of the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned "an awful lot" from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that. ... They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."

Applications and criticisms

Thomas Huxley is sometimes misattributed with proposing a variant of the theory in his debates with Samuel Wilberforce.

In his 1931 book The Mysterious Universe, Eddington's rival James Jeans attributed the monkey parable to a "Huxley", presumably meaning Thomas Henry Huxley. This attribution is incorrect. Today, it is sometimes further reported that Huxley applied the example in a now-legendary debate over Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species with the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, held at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford on 30 June 1860. This story suffers not only from a lack of evidence, but the fact that in 1860 the typewriter itself had yet to emerge.

Despite the original mix-up, monkey-and-typewriter arguments are now common in arguments over evolution. As an example of Christian apologetics Doug Powell argued that even if a monkey accidentally types the letters of Hamlet, it has failed to produce Hamlet because it lacked the intention to communicate. His parallel implication is that natural laws could not produce the information content in DNA. A more common argument is represented by Reverend John F. MacArthur, who claimed that the genetic mutations necessary to produce a tapeworm from an amoeba are as unlikely as a monkey typing Hamlet's soliloquy, and hence the odds against the evolution of all life are impossible to overcome.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins employs the typing monkey concept in his book The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate the ability of natural selection to produce biological complexity out of random mutations. In a simulation experiment Dawkins has his weasel program produce the Hamlet phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, starting from a randomly typed parent, by "breeding" subsequent generations and always choosing the closest match from progeny that are copies of the parent, with random mutations. The chance of the target phrase appearing in a single step is extremely small, yet Dawkins showed that it could be produced rapidly (in about 40 generations) using cumulative selection of phrases. The random choices furnish raw material, while cumulative selection imparts information. As Dawkins acknowledges, however, the weasel program is an imperfect analogy for evolution, as "offspring" phrases were selected "according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target." In contrast, Dawkins affirms, evolution has no long-term plans and does not progress toward some distant goal (such as humans). The weasel program is instead meant to illustrate the difference between non-random cumulative selection, and random single-step selection. In terms of the typing monkey analogy, this means that Romeo and Juliet could be produced relatively quickly if placed under the constraints of a nonrandom, Darwinian-type selection because the fitness function will tend to preserve in place any letters that happen to match the target text, improving each successive generation of typing monkeys.

A different avenue for exploring the analogy between evolution and an unconstrained monkey lies in the problem that the monkey types only one letter at a time, independently of the other letters. Hugh Petrie argues that a more sophisticated setup is required, in his case not for biological evolution but the evolution of ideas:

In order to get the proper analogy, we would have to equip the monkey with a more complex typewriter. It would have to include whole Elizabethan sentences and thoughts. It would have to include Elizabethan beliefs about human action patterns and the causes, Elizabethan morality and science, and linguistic patterns for expressing these. It would probably even have to include an account of the sorts of experiences which shaped Shakespeare's belief structure as a particular example of an Elizabethan. Then, perhaps, we might allow the monkey to play with such a typewriter and produce variants, but the impossibility of obtaining a Shakespearean play is no longer obvious. What is varied really does encapsulate a great deal of already-achieved knowledge.

James W. Valentine, while admitting that the classic monkey's task is impossible, finds that there is a worthwhile analogy between written English and the metazoan genome in this other sense: both have "combinatorial, hierarchical structures" that greatly constrain the immense number of combinations at the alphabet level.

Zipf's law states that the frequency of words is a power law function of its frequency rank:

where are real numbers. Assuming that a monkey is typing randomly, with fixed and nonzero probability of hitting each letter key or white space, then the text produced by the monkey follows Zipf's law.[25]

Literary theory

R. G. Collingwood argued in 1938 that art cannot be produced by accident, and wrote as a sarcastic aside to his critics,

... some ... have denied this proposition, pointing out that if a monkey played with a typewriter ... he would produce ... the complete text of Shakespeare. Any reader who has nothing to do can amuse himself by calculating how long it would take for the probability to be worth betting on. But the interest of the suggestion lies in the revelation of the mental state of a person who can identify the 'works' of Shakespeare with the series of letters printed on the pages of a book ...

Nelson Goodman took the contrary position, illustrating his point along with Catherine Elgin by the example of Borges' " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote",

What Menard wrote is simply another inscription of the text. Any of us can do the same, as can printing presses and photocopiers. Indeed, we are told, if infinitely many monkeys ... one would eventually produce a replica of the text. That replica, we maintain, would be as much an instance of the work, Don Quixote, as Cervantes' manuscript, Menard's manuscript, and each copy of the book that ever has been or will be printed.

In another writing, Goodman elaborates, "That the monkey may be supposed to have produced his copy randomly makes no difference. It is the same text, and it is open to all the same interpretations. ..." Gérard Genette dismisses Goodman's argument as begging the question.

For Jorge J. E. Gracia, the question of the identity of texts leads to a different question, that of author. If a monkey is capable of typing Hamlet, despite having no intention of meaning and therefore disqualifying itself as an author, then it appears that texts do not require authors. Possible solutions include saying that whoever finds the text and identifies it as Hamlet is the author; or that Shakespeare is the author, the monkey his agent, and the finder merely a user of the text. These solutions have their own difficulties, in that the text appears to have a meaning separate from the other agents: What if the monkey operates before Shakespeare is born, or if Shakespeare is never born, or if no one ever finds the monkey's typescript?

Random document generation

The theorem concerns a thought experiment which cannot be fully carried out in practice, since it is predicted to require prohibitive amounts of time and resources. Nonetheless, it has inspired efforts in finite random text generation.

One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in The New Yorker, came up with a result on 4 August 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years, one of the "monkeys" typed, " VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-';8.t" The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from "Timon of Athens", 17 from "Troilus and Cressida", and 16 from "Richard II".

A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on 1 July 2003, contained a Java applet that simulated a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from Henry IV, Part 2, reporting that it took "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years" to reach 24 matching characters:

RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r"5j5&?OWTY Z0d

Due to processing power limitations, the program used a probabilistic model (by using a random number generator or RNG) instead of actually generating random text and comparing it to Shakespeare. When the simulator "detected a match" (that is, the RNG generated a certain value or a value within a certain range), the simulator simulated the match by generating matched text.

Testing of random-number generators

Questions about the statistics describing how often an ideal monkey is expected to type certain strings translate into practical tests for random-number generators; these range from the simple to the "quite sophisticated". Computer-science professors George Marsaglia and Arif Zaman report that they used to call one such category of tests "overlapping m- tuple tests" in lectures, since they concern overlapping m-tuples of successive elements in a random sequence. But they found that calling them "monkey tests" helped to motivate the idea with students. They published a report on the class of tests and their results for various RNGs in 1993.

In popular culture

The infinite monkey theorem and its associated imagery is considered a popular and proverbial illustration of the mathematics of probability, widely known to the general public because of its transmission through popular culture rather than through formal education. This is helped by the innate humor stemming from the image of literal monkeys rattling away on a set of typewriters, and is a popular visual gag.

A quotation attributed to a 1996 speech by Robert Wilensky stated, "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."

The enduring, widespread popularity of the theorem was noted in the introduction to a 2001 paper, "Monkeys, Typewriters and Networks: The Internet in the Light of the Theory of Accidental Excellence". In 2002, an article in The Washington Post said, "Plenty of people have had fun with the famous notion that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time could eventually write the works of Shakespeare". In 2003, the previously mentioned Arts Council funded experiment involving real monkeys and a computer keyboard received widespread press coverage. In 2007, the theorem was listed by magazine in a list of eight classic thought experiments.

American playwright David Ives' short one-act play Words, Words, Words, from the collection All in the Timing, pokes fun of the concept of the infinite monkey theorem.

In 2015 Balanced Software released Monkey Typewriter on the Microsoft Store. The software generates random text using the Infinite Monkey theorem string formula. The software queries the generated text for user inputted phrases. However the software should not be considered true to life representation of the theory. This is a more of a practical presentation of the theory rather than scientific model on how to randomly generate text.

1. ^ This shows that the probability of typing "banana" in one of the predefined non-overlapping blocks of six letters tends to 1. In addition the word may appear across two blocks, so the estimate given is conservative.

2. ^ The first theorem is proven by a similar if more indirect route in Gut (2005).

3. Using the Hamlet text ^ "from gutenberg.org"., there are 132680 alphabetical letters and 199749 characters overall

4. For any required string of 130,000 letters from the set 'a'-'z', the average number of letters that needs to be typed until the string appears is (rounded) 3.4 × 10^ 183,946, except in the case that all letters of the required string are equal, in which case the value is about 4% more, 3.6 × 10183,946. In that case failure to have the correct string starting from a particular position reduces with about 4% the probability of a correct string starting from the next position (i.e., for overlapping positions the events of having the correct string are not independent; in this case there is a positive correlation between the two successes, so the chance of success after a failure is smaller than the chance of success in general). The figure 3.4 × 10183,946 is derived from n = 26¹³⁰⁰⁰⁰ by taking the logarithm of both sides: log₁₀(n) = 1300000×log₁₀(26) = 183946.5352, therefore n = 100.5352 × 10¹⁸³⁹⁴⁶ = 3.429 × 10¹⁸³⁹⁴⁶.

5. 26 letters ×2 for capitalisation, 12 for punctuation characters = 64, 199749×log^ ₁₀(64) = 4.4 × 10360,783 (this is generous as it assumes capital letters are separate keys, as opposed to a key combination, which makes the problem vastly harder).

6. There are ~10^ ⁸⁰ protons in the observable universe. Assume the monkeys write for 10³⁸ years (10²⁰ years is when all stellar remnants will have either been ejected from their galaxies or fallen into black holes, 10³⁸ years is when all but 0.1% of protons have decayed). Assuming the monkeys type non-stop at a ridiculous 400 words per minute (the world record is 216 WPM for a single minute), that is about 2,000 characters per minute (Shakespeare's average word length is a bit under 5 letters). There are about half a million minutes in a year, this means each monkey types half a billion characters per year. This gives a total of 10⁸⁰×10³⁸×10⁹ = 10¹²⁷ letters typed - which is still zero in comparison to 10360,783. For a one in a trillion chance, multiply the letters typed by a trillion: 10¹²⁷×10¹⁵ = 10¹⁴⁵. 10360,783/10¹⁴⁵ = 10360,641.

7. As explained at ^ "More monkeys". Archived from the original on 16 October 2009. the problem can be approximated further: 10¹⁴⁵/log₁₀(64) = 78.9 characters.

8. Examples of the theorem being referred to as proverbial include: ^ Schooler, Jonathan W.; Dougal, Sonya (1999). "Why creativity is not like the proverbial typing monkey". Psychological Inquiry. 10 (4).; and Koestler, Arthur (1972). The Case of the Midwife Toad. New York. p. 30. Neo-Darwinism does indeed carry the nineteenth-century brand of materialism to its extreme limits - to the proverbial monkey at the typewriter, hitting by pure chance on the proper keys to produce a Shakespeare sonnet. The latter is sourced from "Parable of the Monkeys"., a collection of historical references to the theorem in various formats.

References

1. ^ Borel, Émile (1913). "Mécanique statique et irréversibilité". Journal de Physique. Paris. 3 (5): 189-196., quoted in "Citation de Émile Borel". Webescence Citations. 2819 (in French). Archived from the original on 2015-11-30.

2. ^ Jorge Luis Borges, "The Total Library", 1939. Anthologized in Selected Non-fictions (1999). Edited by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Viking

3. ^ Isaac, Richard E. (1995). The Pleasures of Probability. New York: Springer. pp. 48-50. ISBN 0-387-94415-X. OCLC 610945749- Isaac generalizes this argument immediately to variable text and alphabet size; the common main conclusion is on page 50.

4. ^ Kittel, Charles; Kroemer, Herbert (1980). Thermal Physics (2nd ed.). San Fransisco: W.H. Freeman Company. p. 53. ISBN 0-7167-1088-9. OCLC 5171399.

5. ^ Borel, Émile (1914). La hasard (in French). Paris: Félix Alcan. p. 164. Archived from the original on 2008-12-03.

6. ^ Eddington, Arthur. "Chapter IV: The Running-Down of the Universe". The Nature of the Physical World 1926-1927: The Gifford Lectures. Archived from the original on 2009-03-08.

7. Aristotle, ^ Περὶ γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾶς (On Generation and Corruption), 315b14.

8. Marcus Tullius Cicero, ^ De natura deorum, 2.37. Translation from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations; Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth, C. D. Yonge, principal translator, New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers, Franklin Square. (1877). Downloadable text.

9. The English translation of "The Total Library" lists the title of Swift's essay as "Trivial Essay on the Faculties of the Soul." The appropriate reference is, instead: Swift, Jonathan, Temple Scott et al. "A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind." The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Volume 1. London: G. Bell, 1897, pp. 291-296. ^ Internet Archive

10. ^ Borges, Jorge Luis (August 1939). "La biblioteca total" [The Total Library]. Sur. No. 59. republished in Selected Non-Fictions. Translated by Weinberger, Eliot. Penguin. 1999. ISBN 0-670-84947-2.

11. ^ "Notes towards the complete works of Shakespeare". vivaria.net. 2002. Archived from the original on 2007-07-16. - some press clippings.

12. ^ K., Alfred (April 2013). "Finite Monkeys Don't Type: A story about the interpretations of probability". Alfred K. Archived from the original on 2022-03-31.

13. ^ "Monkeys don't write Shakespeare". Wired News. Associated Press. 2003-05-09. Archived from the original on 2004-02-01.

14. ^ Conrad, B.; Mitzenmacher, M. (July 2004). "Power laws for monkeys typing randomly: the case of unequal probabilities". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 50 (7): 1403-1414. doi:10.1109/TIT.2004.830752. ISSN 1557-9654. S2CID 8913575.

15. p. 126 of ^ The Principles of Art, as summarized and quoted by Sclafani, Richard J. (1975). "The logical primitiveness of the concept of a work of art". British Journal of Aesthetics. 15 (1): 14. doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/15.1.14.

16. ^ Acocella, Joan (9 April 2007). "The typing life: How writers used to write". The New Yorker. - a review of Wershler-Henry, Darren (2007). The Iron Whim: A fragmented history of typewriting. Cornell University Press.

17. ^ Inglis-Arkell, Esther (June 9, 2011). "The story of the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator Project". io9. gizmodo.

18. ^ Marsaglia, George; Zaman, Arif (1993). "Monkey tests for random number generators". Computers & Mathematics with Applications. Elsevier, Oxford. 26 (9): 1-10. doi:10.1016/0898-1221(93)90001-C. ISSN 0898-1221.

19. ^ Susan Ratcliffe, ed. (2016), "Robert Wilensky 1951-American academic", Oxford Essential Quotations, Oxford University Press, in Mail on Sunday 16 February 1997 'Quotes of the Week'

20. ^ Lewis, Bob (1997-06-02). "It's time for some zoning laws in today's version of the Old West: the Web". Enterprise Computing, IS Survival Guide. InfoWorld. Vol. 19, no. 22. InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. p. 84. ISSN 0199-6649. May also be in "Bob Lewis's IS Survival Guide", published March 19, 1999, ISBN 978-0672314377

21. ^ Hoffmann, Ute; Hofmann, Jeanette (2001). "Monkeys, Typewriters and Networks" (PDF). Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung gGmbH (WZB). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-05-13.

22. ^ Ringle, Ken (28 October 2002). "Hello? This is Bob". The Washington Post. p. C01. Archived from the original on 15 November 2002.

23. ^ Lorge, Greta (May 2007). "The best thought experiments: Schrödinger's cat, Borel's monkeys". Wired. Vol. 15, no. 6.

24. ^ "Monkey Typewriter". Microsoft Store Apps. Balanced Software. 2015-11-16. 9NBLGGH69FC8.

External links

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The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times.

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The coastal city has received a lot of Chinese investment in recent years. Inside the China Project compound, at least 8,000 people are held prisoner, trained to commit Internet fraud. A Khmer Times investigation found that criminals are moving their activities to other parts of the country.

Phnom Penh (AsiaNews/Agencies) - From the outside they look like a dozen square buildings, residential complexes for Cambodian or foreign workers. In reality, the China Project hosts 8,000 to 10,000 slaves, people recruited by deception, held prisoner and forced to commit Internet fraud.

"Every Chinese person who spends more than a couple of months in Sihanoukville knows about it. They call it China City," an anonymous source told the Khmer Times.

A group of entrepreneurs who bought the entire area after Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen banned gambling in 2019 is behind the crime syndicate.

Sihanoukville has changed in recent years. Before Chinese investments poured in, it was a sleepy coastal town in southern Cambodia.

After Chinese President Xi Jinping launched his mega infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Western tourists were thrown out to make room for the Chinese.

Signs in Khmer and English have disappeared, replaced by signs in Mandarin. Hotels, restaurants and casinos now form many small Chinatowns.

The city is BRI's first port of call with the Chinese investing US$ 4.2 billion in local power plants and offshore oil fields.

China also provided US0 million in aid to modernise Cambodia's military. Perhaps this is why China Project bosses can act undisturbed.

"China City is the worst of the worst," the source told the Khmer Times. "They are protected by the police. The only reason the cops will go in there is a strong tip-off about drugs. It's a very clear line in the sand," he added.

According to the Cambodian newspaper, most slaves are Chinese, but many come from Southeast Asia.

Scammed with fake job offers, their passport seized, taught how to create realistic social profiles to trick people into investing in fake cryptocurrencies, they are groomed to engage in criminal behaviour.

Whoever gets to turn social media interactions into WhatsApp or WeChat contacts gets a reward, such as having sex with East European women, who are also held prisoner.

According to some witnesses, one scammer managed to steal up to US$ 400,000 from a single individual.

Some of these modern-day slaves are forced to find new recruits for the China Project through the same fraudulent methods with which they were first tricked.

An anonymous police officer reported that near the China Project, law enforcement officers find bodies every other week, but cannot separate murders and suicides. Sometimes bodies have messages written on their arms indicating that the death was not by suicide.

The husband of a former China Project "employee" said that his wife had been referred to the company through an agency as a call centre employee.

"Everything was okay in the beginning," he explained. Then "They said they would train her near the airport". Eventually, "the company picked up my wife from my house and took her to the training centre. But when they were on their way, they said that they had to take her to a trainer in Sihanoukville."

The woman quickly realised that it was a scam and that people in Europe were being scammed. "She immediately said that she wanted to resign but the people there did not allow her to leave. They wanted to sell her to another company."

Other sources confirm that people are sold and then moved to other buildings. And going to the Cambodian police with such a story will not change things.

"I told the story to the police but they didn't take any action," the husband said. "I didn't give any money but they wanted ,000 at first". When "some news websites talked about what happened, she was released."

Following the Khmer Times investigation, local real estate agents reported receiving many requests for housing from companies in the city.

It appears that the crime bosses are now moving to O'tres, Victory Hill, near the seaport and downtown Sihanoukville. Some are thought to be looking at Battambang province and even the capital Phnom Penh.

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CAMBODIA Modern slaves exploited by Chinese bosses in Sihanoukville for online scams

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The coastal city has received a lot of Chinese investment in recent years. Inside the China Project compound, at least 8,000 people are held prisoner, trained to commit Internet fraud. A Khmer Times investigation found that criminals are moving their activities to other parts of the country.

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揭秘血奴交易黑市：“人体脂肪每公斤20美金”

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揭秘血奴交易黑市："人体脂肪每公斤20美金"_哔哩哔哩_bilibili

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揭秘血奴交易黑市："人体脂肪每公斤20美"ლ(´ڡ`ლ) 点个关注，就能暴富

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Lured by fake job ad, Chinese man held captive as ‘blood slave’ for months in Cambodia

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Lured by fake job ad, Chinese man held captive as ‘blood slave’ for months in Cambodia

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A Chinese man was nearly drained of all his blood by the time he escaped his captors in Sihanoukville city, Cambodia.

The man, identified only by his surname Li, was kidnapped by a gang and used as a "blood slave" for months, reported South China Morning Post .

Li's life as a "blood slave"

Since August 2021, the gang reportedly took 27 ounces (800 milliliters) of blood from the 31-year-old man each month, leaving him just enough time to replenish his blood supply. It is believed that the gang sold the blood online to private buyers.

A normal blood donation usually just takes around 16 ounces (470 milliliters) of blood , which is about 8% of the average blood volume of an adult. While the human body is able to replace this volume within 24 to 48 hours, replenishing red blood cells take up around 10 to 12 weeks. This is why the American Red Cross recommends that a person wait at least eight weeks (56 days) before donating again.

Li was drained of so much blood that his captors began drawing from his head as the veins in his arms could no longer supply enough blood.

He managed to escape with the help of one of the gang members earlier this month, but was already in a poor physical state and suffering from multiple organ failure. When Li was admitted to a hospital on Feb. 12, his arms were heavily bruised and covered with needle marks.

Li's abduction

Li, who previously worked as a security guard in Shenzhen and Beijing, told local press that he was lured by a different gang to southern China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region through a job advertisement from a fake company.

According to Li, the gang decided to take blood from him after he refused to join their online fraud operation. Under a threat of being sold to organ harvesters, Li was forced to let them take his blood. The gang members also used electric prods on him and other captives to beat them into submission. Li revealed that there were at least seven other men held captive in the room he was detained in.

Because Li has the universal blood type O negative, the gang took more blood from him than the other men. He recalled how the person who initially tested his blood exclaimed that his blood type was "quite valuable."

This gang then abducted Li and brought him to the China-Vietnam border. After forcing him to cross the border, the gang took him to Ho Chi Minh City and then eventually to Sihanoukville. Once in Cambodia, another gang running an online fraud company bought Li for $18,500.

Based on Li's description, all of the gangs' members are Chinese and coldly treated the captives as "tools for making money."

Li is currently receiving treatment in a hospital and is reportedly in stable condition.

In a statement, the Chinese embassy in Cambodia said that it has called upon Cambodian authorities to look into the case. A representative of the embassy visited Li in the hospital this week.

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Enjoy this content? Read more from NextShark! John Oliver Destroys the Model Minority Myth in 'Last Week Tonight' Singaporean Professor Lectures for 2 Hours, Dies Inside After Realizing He was Muted the Whole Time Simu Liu Named the New Ambassador of UNICEF Canada NextShark and C100 Launches #FacesOfTheCure to Highlight Heroes Fighting COVID-19

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Chinese man lured by fake job ad is held captive as 'blood slave' for months in Cambodia

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A Chinese man was nearly drained of all his blood by the time he escaped his captors in Sihanoukville city, Cambodia. The man, identified only by his surname Li, was kidnapped by a gang and used as a "blood slave" for months, reported South China Morning Post.

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One of Google Allo's biggest features, when compared to regular SMS texting, was the AI-powered Smart Replies that Google brought over from Google Assistant. But if you, like most people, don't actually use Allo, you'll soon be able to take advantage of smart replies in the regular Android Messages app, as announced by the Project Fi Twitter account.

The feature seems to work similarly to how it does in Allo, Gmail, or Assistant: Google analyzes the text of the conversation, and automatically generates contextual responses in the messaging app that you can select for quick replies. It would seem that to use the feature, Google would require access to your SMS history in addition to all the other personal data that the company has, although messages aren't stored by Google. Users will also be able to turn this feature on or off.

For now, Google has confirmed that Smart Reply for Android Messages is only rolling out for Project Fi users.

Update January 25th, 5:30pm Google has confirmed that Smart Reply is only available for Project Fi users for now. Also updated article to clarify that Google does not store messages and that Smart Replies can be turned off.

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Google is bringing Allo's Smart Reply feature to the Android Messages app

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Google is bringing over the Smart Reply feature from Google Allo to the regular Android Messages app, allowing for automatically generated suggestions of quick responses for your texts. The feature is available for Project Fi customers today, and it should roll out to all users soon.

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Smart Replies are contextually relevant, one-touch responses that help the user to reply to an incoming text message (or email) efficiently and effortlessly. Smart Replies have been highly successful across several Google products including Gmail, Inbox and Allo. The On-device Smart Reply model is targeted towards text chat use cases.