双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第8章:水银延时线(16)
日期:2019-03-28 15:20

(单词翻译:单击)

Logical as this was, and certainly comprehensible to mathematicians, who had been familiar with binary numbers for three hundred years at least, the fact was that 'fussy little details' such as this were more of a headache for other people.
对于数学家来说,这并不难理解,他们至少在300年前就对二进制很熟悉了。
To an engineer, in particular, it would come as a revelation that the concept of number could be separated from its representation in decimal form.
但是那些所谓的工程细节,对其他人来说却是一种折磨,尤其是对工程师来说,二进制与十进制完全不是一回事,他们很难接受这一点。
Many people would see the 'binary' arithmetic of the ACE as itself a weird and wonderful innovation.
有许多人认为,ACE的二进制本身就是一项奇怪又奇妙的创举。
Whilst he was perfectly correct in seeing this as a detail, it was a good example of his difficulties in communication with the kind of people who might fund, organise, and build his machine.
但图灵却把这件事说成一个"小细节",可见他是多么不懂得在别人面前展示自己,哪怕是将要资助、组织、制造他的机器的人。
But with such details disposed of, he concentrated his report upon the two really important things: the memory and the control.
讲完这些细节之后,他的报告集中于两个确实非常重要的问题:存储和控制。
Considering the storage problem, he listed every form of discrete store that he and Don Bayley had thought of,
在存储方面,他列举了他跟唐·贝利研究过的每一种离散存储机制,
including film, plugboards, wheels, relays, paper tape, punched cards, magnetic tape, and 'cerebral cortex', each with an estimate,
包括胶片、插线板、转盘、继电器、纸带、打孔卡片、磁带,甚至还有大脑皮层,并且分别进行了评估。
in some cases obviously fanciful, of access time, and of the number of digits that could be stored per pound sterling.
有一些明显是不靠谱的,要么太慢,要么太贵。
At one extreme, the storage could all be on electronic valves, giving access within a microsecond, but this would be prohibitively expensive.
比如说,把所有的数据都存在电子管中,读取时间不超过一毫秒,但其成本却极其高昂。

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