雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第5章:解謎接力賽(117)
Jack Good, like Alan, had the Bletchley mind, not being simply 'a mathematician', but a person who enjoyed exploring the connections between logical skills and the physical world.
Chess interested him too.
他也喜歡國際象棋。He had already in 1938 published a light-hearted article on mechanised chess-playing in the first issue of Eureka, the house magazine of the Cambridge mathematics students.
他在1938年在第一期《發現》（劍橋的一份數學雜誌）上發表了一篇小論文，關於國際象棋的機械化玩法。
Over meal-times on night shift they would talk about the problem of mechanising chess.
在晚飯後的夜班時間，他們會一起討論機器國際象棋。They latched on to a basic idea, which they agreed to be obvious.
他們一致認爲，有一個想法是很明顯的，It was that a chess player might often see wonderful moves that could be made if only the opponent would do such-and-such,
那就是國際象棋的玩家會思考"如果對手怎樣怎樣，我就可以走個好步"。but in serious play, White would assume that Black would always exploit the situation to maximum advantage.
在實際中，白方總是假設黑方會最大限度地利用局勢，White's strategy therefore would be to make the move least advantageous to Black—the move making Black's best move the least successful of all the possible best moves—the minimum maximum, in fact.
所以白方的策略就是儘量不給黑方留下優勢，他的每一步移動，都是儘可能地降低黑方最好的一步的優勢。實際上，就是將最大值最小化。This was not a new idea.
這不是個新想法。The theory of games had been studied mathematically since the 1920s, and this principle, second nature to chessplayers, had been abstracted and formalised in the manner of modern mathematics.
自從20年代，博弈論的研究就已經開展了，而這個原則，也已經用現代數學的方法進行了抽象化和形式化。The word 'minimax' had been coined for the idea of the least bad course of action.
最大值最小化，這個概念也已經被提了出來。It applied not only to games like chess, but also to those which involved guessing and bluffing.
不光是國際象棋用到這個概念，還有那些涉及到猜測的遊戲。
