[user5994461]

When you announce an improvement of 18-24% over the state of the art, what you think is the state of the art makes a lot of difference.

[thisisdave]

The authors state that HashCat uses Markov models and that they outperform it.

[reviseddamage]

He doesn't get it. Someone else replied to his comment stating the same thing you did, i think he is selectively blind to the word "Markov", he missed them in the article and in the replies.