For instance, he had made a convention that the machines should print out the 'computable numbers' on alternate squares of the 'tape', and use the intervening squares as working space.
比如说，艾伦设定了这种机器是在方格中写入可计算数，并以方格作为工作空间，而不是采用一些更普遍的、无限制的工作空间。
But it would have been much easier if he had made a more generous allowance of working space.
而言之，在数理逻辑的小圈子之外，艾伦的这篇论文非常没有吸引力。
So there was little about his work to attract anyone from outside the narrow circle of mathematical logic—with the possible exception of pure mathematicians who would be interested in the distinction between the computable numbers and the real numbers.
总兰瑟洛特·霍格本提倡科学要以人为本，
It had nothing obvious to do with what Lancelot Hogben called 'the world's work'.
从这个角度来看，艾伦的论文似乎百无一用。
There was one person, one of those few who were professionally interested in mathematical logic, who read the paper with a very considerable personal interest.
不过，在数理逻辑的小圈子里，确实有一个人非常有兴趣地读完了这篇论文。
This was Emil Post, a Polish-American mathematician teaching at the City College of New York, who since the early 1920s had anticipated some of Gdel and Turing ideas in unpublished form.
他是一位波兰裔数学家，名叫艾米尔·波斯特，在纽约城市大学教书，早在20年代以前，他就产生了类似于哥德尔和图灵的想法，但没有发表。
In October 1936 he had submitted to Church's Journal of Symbolic Logic a paper which proposed a way of making precise what was meant by 'solving a general problem'.
1936年10月，他向《符号逻辑》提交了一篇论文，关于通过一种普适的方法提高计算精度。
It referred specifically to Church's paper, the one which solved the Hilbert decision problem but required an assertion that any definite method could be expressed as a formula in his lambda-calculus.
他在其中引用了丘奇的论文，正是回答希尔伯特判定性问题的那篇。
Post proposed that a definite method would be one which could be written in the form of instructions to a mindless 'worker' operating on an infinite line of 'boxes', who would be capable only of reading the instructions and
波斯特指出，一个确定的过程，可以写成指令的形式，交给一个无需思考的操作者，在无限多的一排盒子中进行操作。操作者的能力只是阅读指令，以及：
(a) Marking the box he is in (assumed empty),
在他所在处的盒子里设一个标记（假设盒子是空的）；
(b) Erasing the mark in the box he is in (assumed marked),
清除他所在处的盒子里面的标记（假设盒子有标记）；
(c) Moving to the box on his right,
移动到左边的盒子；
(d) Moving to the box on his left,
移动到右边的盒子；
(e) Determining whether the box he is in, is or is not marked.
查看他所在处的盒子里是否有标记。