He might well have admitted that for certain problems, the analogue solution could not remotely be rivalled by a digital method.
图灵也许不得不承认，对于某些问题，数字方法完全无法与模拟方法匹敌。
Putting a model aircraft in a wind tunnel would immediately produce a picture of stresses and vortices that centuries of calculation would never obtain.
把一个飞机模型放进风道，会立刻得到几个世纪都算不出来的受力分析图。
In 1945 there was plenty of scope for debating the relative practical usefulness of analogue and digital devices, and the priorities for construction.
在1945年，在模拟和数字二者之间，关于它们的实用性和研究优先性，还有很多进一步讨论的余地。
But so far as Alan Turing was concerned, this was a debate for other people.
但是对艾伦来说，这种讨论都是别人的事情，
He was committed to the digital approach, flowing out of the Turing machine concept, and with its potential universality at the centre.
他完全致力于数字方法，这是图灵机的基础，而且其中隐藏着通用机器的潜力。
No analogue machine could lay claim to universality, such devices being constructed to be physical analogies of particular problems.
模拟机器不可能具有通用性，这样的机器只能解决特定的问题。
It followed that his ideas had to find their place among, and compete with, the prevailing developments of digital calculators.
接下来，他要找到一个入手点，并且要与数字计算器的发展竞争。
There had been machines to add and multiply numbers, the digital equivalents of the slide rule, since the seventeenth century.
早在17世纪，就有可以进行加法和乘法运算的机器，
Alan had a desk calculator at Hanslope, and used it for the calculation of circuit properties.
艾伦在汉斯洛普有个台式计算器，用它来做一些电路方面的计算。
It was a very long step indeed from such devices to the idea of a practical universal machine.
这些设备和通用机器之间，还有很长的距离，
But as Alan knew by this time, that step had been made a hundred years before, by the British mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871).
然而艾伦知道，100年前就有人跨出了这一步，他就是英国数学家查尔斯·巴贝奇（1791-1871）。
He used to speak to Don Bayley of Babbage, and knew something of what Babbage had planned.
他曾经跟唐·贝利提起过巴贝奇，他了解巴贝奇的计划。