双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第8章:水银延时线(19)
Of course, there was to be no physical Motion when the 'scanner' went to fetch an instruction, or operate upon numbers stored on the 'tape'; no motion but that of electrons.
Instead, the control of the ACE would work by a process rather like that of dialling a telephone number, to reach the right place.
ACE的定位控制，是一个类似于电话号码的机制，Most of the complexity of the electronic circuits arose from the demands of this 'tree' system.
它是一个树状的系统，很大程度上是由电路来解决的。
There was also a complexity in the way that thirty-two half-way houses, 'temporary storage' locations consisting of special short delay lines, were provided for the shunting around of pulses.
还有一个问题，就是要用32条特殊的短程延迟线组成的"暂存线"来中转脉冲。This was quite different from the EDVAC conception, in which all the arithmetic would be done by shunting numbers in and out of a central 'accumulator'.
这与EDVAC非常不同，在EDVAC的设计中，所有的算术运算都是通过将数据输入或输出"累加器"来完成的。In the ACE design the arithmetical operations were 'distributed' around the thirty-two 'temporary storage' delay lines in an ingenious way.
而ACE的设计则通过一种巧妙的方式，将算术运算分配在32个短程延迟线上。The point of this complexity was that it increased the speed of operation. Speed took a slightly higher priority than simplicity.
这样做的优点，就是提高了运算速度，而速度比简单更重要。This was reflected also in the fact that Alan planned the pulse rate of the ACE to be a million a second, straining electronic technology to the full.
图灵充分利用电子技术，使ACE的速度高达每秒100万次脉冲注。His emphasis on speed was natural enough, granted his Bletchley experience, in which speed was of the very essence, a few hours marking the difference between usefulness and pointlessness.
他之所以对速度非常重视，可能是出于他在布莱切利的经历。在那里，速度就是一切，几小时的滞后，可以使所有工作前功尽弃。It was also related to the universality of the electronic computer.
另外，速度跟通用性也有关系。In 1942 they had tried to get faster Bombes to cope with the fourth rotor;
1942年，第四个转盘从天而降，他们必须使炸弹机跑得更快，才能对付它。they had been saved by the German slip-up with the weather reporting signal system,
如果不是后来德国乱发气象信号，but without this stroke of fortune they would have had to wait over a year for the machinery to match the problem.
他们可能需要一年的时间，才能解决这个问题。One virtue of a universal machine would lie in its ability to take on any new problem immediately—but this meant that it must be as fast as possible from the start.
通用机的优点，就是能够随时着手，处理新出现的问题，而这也意味着，通用机必须尽可能地快。It would hardly be desirable to re-engineer a universal machine, for the sake of a special problem. The whole point was to get the engineering out of the way once and for all, so that all the work thereafter could go into the devising of instruction tables.
人们不可能为了解决一个更难的问题，而重新设计一个更快的通用机，所以必须尽量使它一次性地满足所有问题，以便后来的工作仅限于编写指令表。
