双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第9章:退隐山林(58)
日期:2019-12-05 18:14

(单词翻译:单击)

He was, of course, very familiar with the teleprinter system from Bletchley and Hanslope.
图灵自然对电传打字机非常熟悉,因为布莱切利和汉斯洛普都有这套东西。
After it had been attached, those 32 different combinations of 0s and Is in five-row teleprinter tape became the language of the Manchester machine, haunting the days and dreams alike of its users.
五条电传纸带,上面有32种不同的0和1的组合,从此这些纸带就成了曼彻斯特机器的语言,日日夜夜地纠缠着它的使用者。
It was Alan's job to make the Manchester machine convenient to use, but his ideas of convenience were not always shared by others.
图灵的工作,是使曼彻斯特机用起来更方便,但是他眼中的"方便",有时候会让别人觉得非常不方便。
He had, of course, attacked the principle on which Wilkes was working according to which the hardware of the machine would be designed to make the instructions easy for a human user to follow—so that in the EDSAC design, the letter 'A' was used as the symbol for the instruction to add.
他研究过威尔克斯的设计思想,即通过机器的硬件设计,使其指令形式尽可能地符合人类的习惯,比如说在EDSAC上,字母"A"就表示相加("Add"的开头字母)。
In contrast, Alan held that human convenience should be catered for by programming techniques, not by electronics.
但图灵的想法与此不同,他认为这种方便性应该通过编程来实现,而不是通过硬件。
In his 1947 talk he had referred to such matters of convenience as 'fussy little details'.
在他1947年的谈话中,他说这些都是"杂七杂八的小细节"。
Now at Manchester, he had the opportunity, in principle, to put this into practice—for the machine hardware had not been designed to pander to the programmer.
现在在曼彻斯特,他有机会实现他自己的想法,因为这台机器的硬件设计,并没有故意迎合编程人员。
However, by 1949 he had lost interest in doing this kind of work. The 'fussy little detail of binary to decimal conversion, for instance, he now found not worth bothering about.
但是现在,也就是1949年,他已经对这些"杂七杂八的小细节"失去兴趣了,比如说二进制和十进制之间的转换,他觉得完全没有必要,
He himself found it simple to work directly in the base-32 arithmetic in which the machine could be regarded as working, and expected other people to do the same.
他发现,直接用32进制进行思考是很简单的,而且希望其他人都这样做。
To use base-32 arithmetic it was necessary to find 32 symbols for the 32 different 'digits'. Here he took over the system already used by the engineers, in which they labelled the five-bit combinations according to the Baudot teleprinter code.
要在纸上使用32进制,就必须为32个不同的"数字"找到32个不同的符号。图灵直接使用了博多电传码,来取代工程师们使用的五位组合码,
Thus the 'twenty-two' digit, corresponding to the sequence 10110 of binary digits, would be written as 'P'.
比如说22这个数,在五位二进制码中表示为10110,而在博多码中可以用"P"来表示。
To work in this system meant memorising the Baudot code and the multiplication table as expressed in it—something he, but few others, found easy.
要想以这种方式进行思考,就必须把博多码及其乘法表背下来。图灵觉得这个很简单,但很少有其他人这么认为。

分享到