Yeah, it looks like he's generating random 9 char strings, then testing to see if they fit anywhere at all in the Shakespeare corpus. If so, they get marked as

Yeah, it looks like he's generating random 9 char strings, then testing to see if they fit anywhere at all in the Shakespeare corpus. If so, they get marked as 'done' (green). The former problem you state is the correct one - that somewhere, one of those infinite monkeys, somewhere on his infinite typewriter paper, will contain a single consecutive string of the entire works of Shakespeare. Obviously that is monsterously more difficult, and almost certainly falls into one of those "If every atom in the universe was a computer, it'd still take x^n billion years" type combinatorial explosions.