双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第7章:运转起来(61)

The construction of speciAl machines had led the cryptanalysts into one problem after another with the acquisition and application of new technology.

构建特定的机器，给密码分析员带来了接二连三的困难，

But a universal machine, if only it could be realised in practice, would require no fresh engineering, only fresh tables, encoded as 'description numbers' and placed upon its 'tape'.

如果通用图灵机能够实现，工程师们就不需要那么拼命了，他们只需要设计新的指令表，并把它编成描述数，打在纸带上就行了。

Such a machine could replace not only Bombes, Colossi, decision trees and all the other mechanical Bletchley tasks, but the whole laborious work of computation into which mathematicians had been conscripted by the war.

这样的机器，不仅可以替代炸弹机、巨人机、决策树，和布莱切利其它所有的机械工作，还能更广泛地替代所有的计算工作，即战时专门雇用数学家来做的那些。

The zeta function machine, the calculation of roots of seventh order equations, the large sets of equations arising in electrical circuit theory—they could all alike be performed by a single machine.

无论是ζ函数机、七次方程求解，还是电子电路中的大规模方程组，都可以用同一个机器来解决。

It was a vision beyond the comprehension of most people in 1945, but not beyond Alan Turing. As he would write later in 1945:

对于1945年的大多数人来说，这件事情是无法理解的，但是艾伦不属于大多数人。1945年，他又写道：

There will positively be no internal alterations to be made even if we wish suddenly to switch from calculating the energy levels of the neon atom to the enumeration of groups of order 720.

即使我们想让一台正在计算氖原子能级的机器，突然改去列举所有阶为720的群，那也不需要对机器本身做任何改动。

or as he would put it in 1948,

1948年他这样说：

We do not need to have an infinity of different machines doing different jobs. A single one will suffice.

我们不需要使用不同的机器来做不同的工作，只要一种机器就足够了。

The engineering problem of producing various machines for various jobs is replaced by the office work of 'programming' the universal machine to do these jobs.

对于不同的工作，我们可以把"设计不同的机器"这个问题，变成"给通用机设计不同的程序"。