TITLE: Given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite amount of time, would one of them write Hamlet?
QUESTION [269 upvotes]: 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?

REPLY [4 votes]: NOTE: By probability, I mean the chance of it happening per iteration, and starting with a new page each time.
Let's take a step back, shall we? (Not too many, because there's a cliff behind you.) Let's think of what the probability is of producing the following randomly:

A

Assuming there are only 26 characters (A-Z, uppercase), the probability would be $\frac{1}{26}$.
What about this:

AA

It'd be $(\frac{1}{26})^2$. This:

AAA

It'd be $(\frac{1}{26})^3$. And this:

XKCD

It'd be $(\frac{0}{26})^4$. [Just kidding, it's: $(\frac{1}{26})^4$].
So, for every character we add to the quote, it will be: $(1/26)^c)$, where $c$ represents the number of characters.
Basically, it would be a probability of $(\frac{1}{26*2+12})^c$ since the characters used could be: A-Z, a-z, .!?,;: "'/() Of course, there could be more characters, but that's just an example. :)