The second American project was under way at Bell Laboratories.
美国的另一个项目是在贝尔实验室进行的。
Here the engineer G. Stibitz had first only thought of designing relay machines to perform decimal arithmetic with complex numbers,
这里的工程师G.斯蒂比兹，一开始只想设计一台继电器机器，用来执行十进制的复数运算。
but after the outbreak of war had incorporated the facility to carry out a fixed sequence of arithmetical operations.
但是在战争爆发后，他又加上了执行固定的算术运算过程的功能。
His 'Model III' was under way in the New York building at the time of Alan's stay there, but it had not drawn his attention.
他的工作"模型3号"就在纽约的办公室进行，其实当时艾伦就在那里，但这并没有吸引他的注意。
There was another person, however, who did make a thorough examination of these two advanced projects, and who like Alan had the mind with which to form a more abstract view of what was happening.
然而，还有另外一个人详细地考查了这两个前沿项目。他与艾伦一样，具有极强的抽象能力，
This was that other mathematician of the wizard war, John von Neumann.
他就是巫师战争中的那位数学家，约翰·冯·诺伊曼。
He had been connected with US Army ballistic research as a consultant since 1937.
从1937年开始，他就担任美军弹道研究的顾问。
From 1941 most of his time had been spent upon the applied mathematics of explosions and aerodynamics.
1941年之后的大部分时间，他都在研究爆炸和空气动力学中的数学问题。
In the first six months of 1943 he was in Britain, conferring on those subjects with G.I. Taylor, the British applied mathematician.
1943年上半年，他在英国，与英国应用数学家G.I.泰勒共同研究这些项目，
It was then that he had first become involved in programming a large calculation, in the sense of organising how it could best be done by people working on desk calculators.
在此期间，他第一次参与到大型计算项目的规划，也就是如何组织和分配工作人员，从而尽可能好地在台式计算器上完成计算过程。
Back in the United States, his entry in September 1943 into the atomic bomb project had taken him into similar problems with shock waves, whose prediction by numerical computation required months of slogging work.
回到美国之后，他于1943年9月加入原子弹项目，他在这个项目中的工作，同样与爆炸冲击波有关。预测冲击波需要进行好几个月的艰难计算，
In 1944 he toured the available machines in search of help. W. Weaver, at the National Development and Research Commission, had put him in touch with Stibitz, and on 27 March 1944 von Neumann wrote22 to Weaver:
因此在1944年，他为了解决这个问题，考察了所有可能的计算机器。国防研究委员会的W·韦弗建议他联系斯蒂比兹，在1944年3月27日，冯·诺伊曼写信给韦弗：
Will write to Stibitz: my curiosity to learn more about the relay computation method, as well as my expectations concerning possibilities in this direction, are much aroused.
我将致信斯蒂比兹：我很有兴趣学习基于继电器的计算方法，这很有可能会解决我正在研究的问题。