雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第7章:運轉起來(68)
He might well have admitted that for certain problems, the analogue solution could not remotely be rivalled by a digital method.
Putting a model aircraft in a wind tunnel would immediately produce a picture of stresses and vortices that centuries of calculation would never obtain.
把一個飛機模型放進風道，會立刻得到幾個世紀都算不出來的受力分析圖。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，在模擬和數字二者之間，關於它們的實用性和研究優先性，還有很多進一步討論的餘地。
But so far as Alan Turing was concerned, this was a debate for other people.
但是對艾倫來說，這種討論都是別人的事情，He was committed to the digital approach, flowing out of the Turing machine concept, and with its potential universality at the centre.
他完全致力於數字方法，這是圖靈機的基礎，而且其中隱藏着通用機器的潛力。No analogue machine could lay claim to universality, such devices being constructed to be physical analogies of particular problems.
模擬機器不可能具有通用性，這樣的機器只能解決特定的問題。It followed that his ideas had to find their place among, and compete with, the prevailing developments of digital calculators.
接下來，他要找到一個入手點，並且要與數字計算器的發展競爭。There had been machines to add and multiply numbers, the digital equivalents of the slide rule, since the seventeenth century.
早在17世紀，就有可以進行加法和乘法運算的機器，Alan had a desk calculator at Hanslope, and used it for the calculation of circuit properties.
艾倫在漢斯洛普有個臺式計算器，用它來做一些電路方面的計算。It was a very long step indeed from such devices to the idea of a practical universal machine.
這些設備和通用機器之間，還有很長的距離，But as Alan knew by this time, that step had been made a hundred years before, by the British mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871).
然而艾倫知道，100年前就有人跨出了這一步，他就是英國數學家查爾斯·巴貝奇（1791-1871）。He used to speak to Don Bayley of Babbage, and knew something of what Babbage had planned.
他曾經跟唐·貝利提起過巴貝奇，他了解巴貝奇的計劃。
