These meetings were an opportunity for Alan to develop the ideas for chess-playing machines that had begun in his 1941 discussion with Jack Good.
这样的一些交流，对艾伦研究象棋机器来说，是很好的机会，他从1941年和杰克·古德交谈时，就开始构思这个机器了。
They often talked about the mechanisation of thought processes, bringing in the theory of probability and weight of evidence, with which Donald Michie was by now familiar.
他们经常讨论思维过程的机械化，引出了概率论和证据权重的理论，唐纳德·米奇已经很熟悉这些理论了。
The development of machines for cryptanalytic work had in any case stimulated discussion as to mathematical problems that could be solved with the mechanical aid—that of finding large prime numbers, for instance, was a topic that came up in lunchtime conversations, rather to the amazement of Flowers, the electronic engineer, who could see no point in it.
密码分析机器的发展，刺激了关于用机器解决数学问题的讨论，比如他们在午餐时讨论的寻找大素数的问题，就让电子工程师弗洛文斯很惊奇，因为他完全听不懂。
But Alan's talk went in rather a different direction.
但是，艾伦的想法是朝着另一个方向，
He was not so much concerned with the building of machines designed to carry out this or that complicated task.
他并不是很关心这种执行复杂任务的机器，
He was now fascinated with the idea of a machine that could learn.
他关心的是一种可以自动学习的机器。
It was a development of his suggestion in Computable Numbers that the states of a machine could be regarded as analogous to 'states of mind'.
这是他在《可计算数》中提到的想法：机器的状态，可以看作思维的状态。
If this were so, if a machine could simulate a brain in the way he had discussed with Claude Shannon, then it would have to enjoy the faculty of brains, that of learning new tricks.
在这个基础上，如果说机器可以通过他与克劳德·香农讨论的方法来模拟大脑，那么它就必须拥有大脑的学习新事物的能力。
He was concerned to counter the objection that a machine, however intricate its task, would only be doing what a person had explicitly designed it to do.
艾伦正在考虑一个争议：机器不管多么复杂，都只能执行人们明确设计好的指令。
In these off-duty discussions they spent a good deal of time on what would be said to count as 'learning'.
在这些闲暇讨论中，他们花了许多时间来探讨什么是"学习"。