雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第7章:運轉起來(61)

The construction of speciAl machines had led the cryptanalysts into one problem after another with the acquisition and application of new technology.

構建特定的機器，給密碼分析員帶來了接二連三的困難，

But a universal machine, if only it could be realised in practice, would require no fresh engineering, only fresh tables, encoded as 'description numbers' and placed upon its 'tape'.

如果通用圖靈機能夠實現，工程師們就不需要那麼拼命了，他們只需要設計新的指令表，並把它編成描述數，打在紙帶上就行了。

Such a machine could replace not only Bombes, Colossi, decision trees and all the other mechanical Bletchley tasks, but the whole laborious work of computation into which mathematicians had been conscripted by the war.

這樣的機器，不僅可以替代炸彈機、巨人機、決策樹，和布萊切利其它所有的機械工作，還能更廣泛地替代所有的計算工作，即戰時專門僱用數學家來做的那些。

The zeta function machine, the calculation of roots of seventh order equations, the large sets of equations arising in electrical circuit theory—they could all alike be performed by a single machine.

無論是ζ函數機、七次方程求解，還是電子電路中的大規模方程組，都可以用同一個機器來解決。

It was a vision beyond the comprehension of most people in 1945, but not beyond Alan Turing. As he would write later in 1945:

對於1945年的大多數人來說，這件事情是無法理解的，但是艾倫不屬於大多數人。1945年，他又寫道：

There will positively be no internal alterations to be made even if we wish suddenly to switch from calculating the energy levels of the neon atom to the enumeration of groups of order 720.

即使我們想讓一臺正在計算氖原子能級的機器，突然改去列舉所有階爲720的羣，那也不需要對機器本身做任何改動。

or as he would put it in 1948,

1948年他這樣說：

We do not need to have an infinity of different machines doing different jobs. A single one will suffice.

我們不需要使用不同的機器來做不同的工作，只要一種機器就足夠了。

The engineering problem of producing various machines for various jobs is replaced by the office work of 'programming' the universal machine to do these jobs.

對於不同的工作，我們可以把"設計不同的機器"這個問題，變成"給通用機設計不同的程序"。