双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第5章:解谜接力赛(38)

He conversed with Edward Travis, Denniston's deputy, about the current cryptanAlytic problems.

他与丹尼斯顿的副手爱德华·特拉维斯交谈，聊到目前的密码分析问题。

Travis posed the far more ambitious problem of the automatic recognition not of a fixed text, but of German language in general.

特拉维斯提出了一个更有野心的问题，要实现自动识别德语。

Jones inventively proposed various solutions, one of which was to mark or punch a paper or film in any one of 26 positions, corresponding to the letter coming out of the machine…

琼斯提出了很多种不同的方案，其中一个是：根据输出的字母，在卡片的26个位置上的对应位置打孔……

and to run the resulting record past a battery of photocells, so that each could count the number of times of occurrence of the letter that it was looking for.

将做好的卡片经过一组光电管，每个光电管统计一个字母的数量。

After a given total count had been achieved, the frequency distribution between the letters could be compared with the one appropriate to the language, which could have been set up on some kind of template.

统计出来之后，用字母的频率分布与德语的普遍分布进行比较，普遍分布情况可以制成模板。

Travis introduced Jones to Alan, who 'liked the idea'.

特拉维斯觉得艾伦会喜欢这个想法，于是把琼斯介绍给艾伦。

But with the Enigma, at least, the central method remained on entirely different lines.

但就谜机来说，中心方法仍在完全不同的方向上，

It kept to the idea of exploiting a known piece of plain-text.

它需要利用一个已知的明文片段。

The difficulty, of course, was that the military Enigma did use a plugboard,

当然，现在的困难是，军用谜机使用了配线板，

which rendered such a naive searching process impossible, there being 150,738,274,937,250 possible ways of connecting ten pairs of letters.

这种天真的搜索过程是不可能成功的，因为一共有150, 738, 274, 937, 250注种可能的配线方式，

In no way could a machine run through them all.

机器也无法进行这么大规模的搜索。