Very good resource. However, I fail to understand how a monkey writing the Hamlet is akin to a brute-force problem, in Terence's own words. The thesis seems to be here that given enough time, a monkey will be able to reason as a human.

Edit: Probably refers to the evolutionary aspect of the problem. My criticism is that he compares the time for a monkey needed to learn the hamlet to merely "quadratic time". I disagree that such degree of non-linearity applies here. I think it is grossly simplified/underestimated.

"The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys independently and 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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Could you be conflating writing hamlet with understanding how to write hamlet? as in, what it takes to end up with the same raw output though devoid of intent and meaning

He doesn’t say quadratic time, he says infinite time. He is talking about the probability of any given string arising from a random sequence of letters. As t goes to infinity that probability approaches 1.

The monkeys don’t understand hamlet. They just bash enough keys that it appears by chance (eventually). Hence “‘It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times…’ Stupid monkey. “

To be fair, I didn't watch the video to the part where he mentions monkeys writing Hamlet, but I thought the point of the monkeys is that they will stumble upon a Hamlet by accident at some point in time, by randomly pressing buttons on a keyboard. Obviously, it would take a long time, but it would happen at some point.