Jack Good, like Alan, had the Bletchley mind, not being simply 'a mathematician', but a person who enjoyed exploring the connections between logical skills and the physical world.
像艾伦一样，杰克·古德也有着布莱切利式的思维方式，他不仅是个数学家，而且乐于探索逻辑与实体之间的联系。
Chess interested him too.
他也喜欢国际象棋。
He had already in 1938 published a light-hearted article on mechanised chess-playing in the first issue of Eureka, the house magazine of the Cambridge mathematics students.
他在1938年在第一期《发现》（剑桥的一份数学杂志）上发表了一篇小论文，关于国际象棋的机械化玩法。
Over meal-times on night shift they would talk about the problem of mechanising chess.
在晚饭后的夜班时间，他们会一起讨论机器国际象棋。
They latched on to a basic idea, which they agreed to be obvious.
他们一致认为，有一个想法是很明显的，
It was that a chess player might often see wonderful moves that could be made if only the opponent would do such-and-such,
那就是国际象棋的玩家会思考"如果对手怎样怎样，我就可以走个好步"。
but in serious play, White would assume that Black would always exploit the situation to maximum advantage.
在实际中，白方总是假设黑方会最大限度地利用局势，
White's strategy therefore would be to make the move least advantageous to Black—the move making Black's best move the least successful of all the possible best moves—the minimum maximum, in fact.
所以白方的策略就是尽量不给黑方留下优势，他的每一步移动，都是尽可能地降低黑方最好的一步的优势。实际上，就是将最大值最小化。
This was not a new idea.
这不是个新想法。
The theory of games had been studied mathematically since the 1920s, and this principle, second nature to chessplayers, had been abstracted and formalised in the manner of modern mathematics.
自从20年代，博弈论的研究就已经开展了，而这个原则，也已经用现代数学的方法进行了抽象化和形式化。
The word 'minimax' had been coined for the idea of the least bad course of action.
最大值最小化，这个概念也已经被提了出来。
It applied not only to games like chess, but also to those which involved guessing and bluffing.
不光是国际象棋用到这个概念，还有那些涉及到猜测的游戏。