雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第7章:運轉起來(73)
The second American project was under way at Bell Laboratories.
Here the engineer G. Stibitz had first only thought of designing relay machines to perform decimal arithmetic with complex numbers,
這裏的工程師G.斯蒂比茲，一開始只想設計一台繼電器機器，用來執行十進制的複數運算。but after the outbreak of war had incorporated the facility to carry out a fixed sequence of arithmetical operations.
但是在戰爭爆發後，他又加上了執行固定的算術運算過程的功能。
His 'Model III' was under way in the New York building at the time of Alan's stay there, but it had not drawn his attention.
他的工作"模型3號"就在紐約的辦公室進行，其實當時艾倫就在那裏，但這並沒有吸引他的注意。There was another person, however, who did make a thorough examination of these two advanced projects, and who like Alan had the mind with which to form a more abstract view of what was happening.
然而，還有另外一個人詳細地考查了這兩個前沿項目。他與艾倫一樣，具有極強的抽象能力，This was that other mathematician of the wizard war, John von Neumann.
他就是巫師戰爭中的那位數學家，約翰·馮·諾伊曼。He had been connected with US Army ballistic research as a consultant since 1937.
從1937年開始，他就擔任美軍彈道研究的顧問。From 1941 most of his time had been spent upon the applied mathematics of explosions and aerodynamics.
1941年之後的大部分時間，他都在研究爆炸和空氣動力學中的數學問題。In the first six months of 1943 he was in Britain, conferring on those subjects with G.I. Taylor, the British applied mathematician.
1943年上半年，他在英國，與英國應用數學家G.I.泰勒共同研究這些項目，It was then that he had first become involved in programming a large calculation, in the sense of organising how it could best be done by people working on desk calculators.
在此期間，他第一次參與到大型計算項目的規劃，也就是如何組織和分配工作人員，從而儘可能好地在台式計算器上完成計算過程。Back in the United States, his entry in September 1943 into the atomic bomb project had taken him into similar problems with shock waves, whose prediction by numerical computation required months of slogging work.
回到美國之後，他於1943年9月加入原子彈項目，他在這個項目中的工作，同樣與爆炸衝擊波有關。預測衝擊波需要進行好幾個月的艱難計算，In 1944 he toured the available machines in search of help. W. Weaver, at the National Development and Research Commission, had put him in touch with Stibitz, and on 27 March 1944 von Neumann wrote22 to Weaver:
因此在1944年，他為了解決這個問題，考察了所有可能的計算機器。國防研究委員會的W·韋弗建議他聯繫斯蒂比茲，在1944年3月27日，馮·諾伊曼寫信給韋弗：Will write to Stibitz: my curiosity to learn more about the relay computation method, as well as my expectations concerning possibilities in this direction, are much aroused.
我將致信斯蒂比茲：我很有興趣學習基於繼電器的計算方法，這很有可能會解決我正在研究的問題。
