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Of course, we've all heard the colloquialism "If a bunch of monkeys pound on a typewriter, eventually one of them will write Hamlet."

I have a (not very mathematically intelligent) friend who presented it as if it were a mathematical fact. Which got me thinking... Is this really true? Of course, I've learned that dealing with infinity can be tricky, but my intuition says that time is countably infinite while the number of works the monkeys could produce is uncountably infinite. Therefore, it isn't necessarily given that the monkeys would write Hamlet.

Could someone who's better at this kind of math than me tell me if this is correct? Or is there more to it than I'm thinking?

Of course, we've all heard the colloquialism "If a bunch of monkeys pound on a typewriter, eventually one of them will write Hamlet."

I have a (not very mathematically intelligent) friend who presented it as if it were a mathematical fact, which got me thinking... Is this really true? Of course, I've learned that dealing with infinity can be tricky, but my intuition says that time is countably infinite while the number of works the monkeys could produce is uncountably infinite. Therefore, it isn't necessarily given that the monkeys would write Hamlet.

Could someone who's better at this kind of math than me tell me if this is correct? Or is there more to it than I'm thinking?